Peter Cross, Portrait of Elizabeth Stanley, Countess of Derby, ca. 1689

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Peter Cross, Portrait of Elizabeth Stanley, Countess of Derby, ca. 1689,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 2, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1208.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Peter Cross, Portrait of Elizabeth Stanley, Countess of Derby, ca. 1689,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 2, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1208.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Elizabeth Stanley (née Butler), Countess of Derby (1660–1717) may have commissioned this signed portrait from Peter Cross to commemorate her appointment as Mistress of the Robes and Groom of the Stole to Queen Mary II of England on April 22, 1689, suggesting a potential date for this previously undated miniature.¹ As Mistress of the Robes, at the age of twenty-nine, Stanley held the most senior position in the queen’s household. She was responsible for Mary II’s personal hygiene, clothing, and jewelry, holding the keys to her public image and providing companionship while attending her at all times in the most intimate capacity. She also served, crucially, as a gatekeeper for politicians, courtiers, and all others who sought privileged access to the monarch.²

Such appointments were politically strategic, powerful, and lucrative, and therefore highly sought after. As the daughter and wife of a peer, Stanley was well situated for such a placement. She was born in 1660 to Vice-Admiral Thomas Butler, 6th Earl of Ossory (1634–1680) and Emilia van Nassau (1635–1688). She married William Stanley, 9th Earl of Derby (ca. 1655–1702) in 1673, when she was about thirteen years old, too young to have sat for this portrait. The sitter here appears closer to thirty, supporting the approximate date of 1689, by which point Cross had established himself as the leading miniaturist at the Stuart court. The countess’s sensuously low-cut blue gown and white chemise conform to typical court fashions of the period, as seen in other miniatures by Cross dating to the mid- to late 1680s.³

Peter Cross likely painted this miniature after a large-scale oil painting at Kilkenny Castle by Willem Wissing (Dutch, 1656–1687), who also painted a widely circulated portrait of Mary II.⁴ While both images are heavily idealized, Cross’s miniature reproduces a number of features visible in Wissing’s portrait: not only the sitter’s aquiline nose and heavy-lidded eyes (a prized and frequently reproduced trait of this era) but also her blue gown and delicately ruffled white chemise that highlights the gown’s neckline and peeks through slashes in the fabric. A jeweled clasp that links the slashed slit of her right sleeve, part of a pair that was painted in a more linear form by Wissing, is just visible at the bottom left of the miniature.⁵

The artist’s characteristic stippling technique, set off in high contrast against the striking dark background he frequently used, imparts texture and volume to the surfaces, creating a hazy sfumato effect that sets it apart from Wissing’s more slickly painted oil portrait.⁶ Cross’s stippling in shades of red, yellow, brown, and flesh tones is particularly visible in the sitter’s creamy skin and curling brown hair, which spills over her left shoulder in the fashion of the time. In addition to the flecks of stippling, Cross used slashing vertical and diagonal marks in blue and black to create the shaded appearance of her gown’s vibrant blue silk fabric and add texture and volume, bringing interest and dimension to a tiny portion of this exquisite, palm-sized miniature.

Notes

1. The miniature was formerly titled Portrait of Lady Elizebeth Derby [sic]. My genealogical research has uncovered the sitter’s name and title as Elizabeth Stanley, Countess of Derby. Household documents list her appointments as Groom of the Stole and Mistress of the Robes to Mary from April 22, 1689, until the queen’s death on December 28, 1694. Annah Hackett et al., “Household of Mary II 1689–1694,” in The Database of Court Officers: 1660–1837, ed. R. O. Bucholz, Loyola University of Chicago, 2013, http://courtofficers.ctsdh.luc.edu/MaryII.list.pdf.

2. For further reading, see Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben, eds., The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2014). The role of the Groom of the Stole was an intimate one, although modern notions of privacy were nonexistent for seventeenth-century monarchs who lived their lives on a public stage. The title was originally called Groom of the Stool in reference to the toilet, or “stool,” for which the Groom was responsible—indeed, no other courtier had closer proximity to the monarch. By the reign of William and Mary, the title had been updated and the role enlarged with a more authoritative, expansive set of responsibilities.

3. See, for example, Peter Cross, Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, ca. 1685–1690, National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 1696, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw01904/Catherine-Sedley-Countess-of-Dorchester?search=sp&sText=npg+1696&firstRun=true&rNo=0. The sitter in another miniature by Cross is similarly attired; see Peter Cross, A Lady, Wearing Blue Dress over White Chemise, ca. 1685, for sale at Philip Mould as of January 2, 2022.

4. Cross’s authorship is undisputed, but it is of interest that a later inscription on the gessoed backing of the miniature’s vellum support—likely by an uninformed owner or enterprising dealer—misleadingly identifies the artist as the oil portraitist Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680). The partially legible inscription reads “Lady Derby by Sir P [?] Lely.”

5. Jane Fenlon, The Ormonde Picture Collection (Dublin: Duchas/Heritage Service, 2001), 77. The similarities between the Ormonde oil painting and the miniature in attire, posture, and, to lesser extent, the sitter’s facial features—and the miniature’s longstanding title as Lady Elizabeth Derby—further support this identification. Curiously, a very similar blue gown with jeweled clasps is worn by Anne Hyde, Duchess of Ormonde, Elizabeth Stanley’s sister-in-law, in a picture attributed to the workshop of Wissing, also at Kilkenny Castle. The attribution to Wissing’s workshop suggests that Hyde’s portrait may have been partially copied after Wissing’s painting of the Countess of Derby.

6. Richard Walker, in a glossary definition of sfumato, describes it as “a softening or smoky effect specially favoured by Peter Cross who used a dotted stipple to achieve sfumato.” Richard Walker, “Glossary,” in Miniatures: A Selection of Miniatures in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1997), 72.

With Duveen Brothers, London, by 1912 [1];

Hans Freiherr Reitzes von Marienwert (1877–1935), Vienna, by 1924 [2];

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1950 [3].

Notes

[1] It is unknown when the Duveens acquired or sold the miniature, but it is illustrated on page 38 of an unpublished stock album along with several other Starr miniatures. It was in their hands by 1912, when they loaned it to an exhibition in Brussels. Duveen Brothers, Miniatures, undated, Series I.A., Box 15, The Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, Los Angeles, California. International Exhibition of Miniatures, Brussels, 1912: British Section (London: Speaight, 1912), 11.

[2] While we are unable to establish a date of acquisition by the Starr family, the miniature was exhibited in 1924 at the Albertina as belonging to Austrian banker Hans Freiherr Reitzes von Marienwert (1877–1935). Several other miniatures cited in [1] on the same page of the Duveen stock album and exhibited by the Duveens in Brussels in 1912 were acquired by von Marienwert as well, most likely purchased at the same time, comprising a group of seventeenth-century miniatures with closely linked twentieth-century provenance narratives. For example, Thomas Flatman’s 1663 Sir Geoffrey Palmer, recently sold as lot 13 at Christie’s on November 20, 2007, was sold by Duveen to von Marienwart, before being acquired by the Starrs’ contemporary Greta Shield Heckett (1899–1976). More conclusively, the provenance for a 1657 portrait of a woman by John Hoskins, sold as lot 13 in the third Pohl-Ströher sale at Sotheby’s, December 5, 2019, was in von Marienwert’s collection by 1924, and it was also later purchased by Mrs. Heckett. If the Hoskins was acquired at the same time as the Nelson-Atkins Portrait of Elizabeth Stanley, Countess of Derby, which seems likely, those dates could apply to our miniature as well. Nicholas Dixon’s Portrait of Sir George Wakeham, 1679, illustrated on page 38 of the stock album, was sold at part II of the Pohl-Ströher sale at Sotheby’s, July 4, 2019, lot 17, also previously owned by Duveen, Marienwart and Heckett.

[3] The miniature may have been part of a group of seventeenth-century works the Starrs purchased on a trip to Europe in the summer of 1949. It was certainly in the Starr collection by 1950, when they exhibited it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These loans are listed in a pamphlet printed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and digitized by the Met’s Watson Library: Four Centuries of Miniature Painting (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950), https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/1175.

William Wissing (Dutch, 1656–1687), Elizabeth Butler (d. 1717), Countess of Derby, eighteenth century, oil on canvas, 49 x 39 in. (124 x 99 cm), Kilkenny Castle, Ireland.

International Exhibition of Miniatures, Brussels, 1912, no. 104.

Internationale Miniaturen-Austellung in der Albertina Wien, Albertina, Vienna, May–June, 1924, no. 183.

Four Centuries of Miniature Painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 19–March 19, 1950, no cat., as Lady Elizabeth Derby.

International Exhibition of Miniatures: Brussels, 1912: British Section (London: W. Speaight and Sons, 1912), 9, as Lady Elizabeth Derby.

Leo Schidlof, Internationale Miniaturen-Ausstellung in der Albertina Wien (Vienna: Gesellschaft der Bilder- und Miniaturenfreunde, 1924), 13, as Lady Elizabeth Derby.

Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 264, as Lady Elizabeth Derby.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 17, p. 13, (repro.), as by Lawrence Crosse, Lady Elizabeth Derby.

Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York City: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 175, (repro), as Lady Elizabeth Derby.