Nicholas Dixon, Portrait of a Man, Possibly General Edmund Ludlow, 1669

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Nicholas Dixon, Portrait of a Man, Possibly General Edmund Ludlow, 1669,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1210.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Nicholas Dixon, Portrait of a Man, Possibly General Edmund Ludlow, 1669,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1210.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

The sitter in this portrait by the enigmatic English miniaturist Nicholas Dixon has been identified since at least 1912 as General Edmund Ludlow (1616/17–1692), who fought for the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War (1642–1651) and voted for the execution of King Charles I in 1649—but it may depict a different man.¹ Dixon signed and dated the miniature in 1669, but Ludlow had fled to Switzerland in August 1660 after the reinstatement of the monarchy, where he remained until 1689. Even in exile, no regicide was safe, and Ludlow was considered a particular target.²

It is difficult to imagine a man in hiding abroad taking the time to sit for his portrait by a notable English artist. Ludlow may have been motivated to do so in order to rehabilitate his image in England, but the political climate there was still quite dangerous for opponents of the monarchy. The painter of this miniature, Nicholas Dixon, is not known to have left England in the 1660s, but since his activities at that time are largely unknown, it is possible that he briefly traveled abroad to study European art, as Samuel Cooper (ca. 1608–1672), his teacher, had done in his youth. Otherwise, we must consider the possibility that Dixon’s skillfully painted miniature portrays not Ludlow but another, as yet unknown, man.

If Dixon did paint Ludlow in Switzerland, the sitter would have been fifty-two or fifty-three years old at the time, which agrees with the age of this sitter. Dixon unsparingly depicts a sober man of middle age with graying brown hair that falls loosely to his shoulders, his face marked by age and strain. Comparison with other known portraits of Ludlow, despite differences in artistic style and the sitter’s age, shows some features in common, including an oval face; a long, aquiline nose; hooded eyes; and thin lips.³

The sitter wears a white lace jabot tied with a black ribbon secured at his neck and a black silk robe draped in rich folds over his right shoulder.⁴ The apparent austerity of his black-and-white attire is belied by the sumptuous textiles; the delicate foliate pattern of the costly lace is carefully delineated in white gouache.⁵ Rapid but confident brushstrokes bring fullness and drama to the folds and pleats of the black silk cloak, adding interest to a seemingly plain and shapeless garment. The simplicity of the sitter’s appearance is set off strikingly by the miniature’s brilliant blue background, a revival of the iconic convention developed by Nicholas Hilliard (ca. 1547–1619) with the introduction of the portrait miniature to 1500s England.

Like many other English miniatures of this period, Dixon’s portrait was painted in watercolor on a prepared vellum card, called a table-book leaf.

Notes

1. International Exhibition of Miniatures, Brussels, 1912: British Section (London: Speaight, 1912), 13. Ludlow sometimes spelled his name as Ludlowe, but the “Ludlow” spelling is more commonly used.

2. A friend warned Ludlow, “You are hated and feared more than all the rest of your companions; your head is set at a great price: ’tis against you they take all this [sic] pains to find assassins.” C. H. Firth, ed., The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, Lieutenant-General of the Horse in the Army of the Commonwealth of England, 1625–1672 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), 2:363–64. General Ludlow remained in Switzerland until he quietly returned to London in 1689. When the House of Commons learned of his presence in England, they immediately took steps to apprehend him. Ludlow escaped again and fled to the Netherlands, and from there back to Switzerland, where he died in 1692. C. H. Firth and Blair Worden, “Ludlow [Ludlowe], Edmund (1616/17–1692), army officer and regicide,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/17161.

3. Robert White’s (1645–1703) drawing of Ludlow (1689; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, B1979.12.733, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:19314) is considered the closest known likeness. Several later prints, likely after White’s portrait, are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, including NPG D19486, D28929, D28929, and D28927.

4. Dixon used a similar arrangement in a 1668 miniature of an unknown man wearing a blue robe, which sold at Bellmans Auctioneers, Billingshurst, UK, on October 1, 2017, lot 960. The robe of the Nelson-Atkins sitter is also similar to those in other miniatures by Dixon in the 1660s and 1670s, including a miniature of Henry Blount (1660s; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 24.80.513), and a portrait of Sir George Wakeman (1679; sold at Sotheby’s, London, July 4, 2019, lot 17).

5. It is tempting to ascribe the sitter’s simplicity of dress to Ludlow’s political and religious views, but a more nuanced perspective is needed. Patrick Little’s research has cast doubt on the traditional assumption that Puritan ideals of plainness and austerity were consistently reflected in an ascetic self-presentation. He has shown how a more accurate view is not one of “dour Puritans led by a killjoy Cromwell, but of a quasi-regal court peopled by fashionably dressed gentlemen, presided over by a Lord Protector who was acutely aware of how his own dress would be interpreted.” Patrick Little, “Fashion at the Cromwellian Court,” The Court Historian 16, no. 1 (2011): 25–42.

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 1950 [3];

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

Notes

[1] It is unknown when the Duveens acquired or sold the miniature, but it is illustrated on page 39 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, and was 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.

International Exhibition of Miniatures, Brussels, 1912, no. 123.

Internationale Miniaturen-Austellung in der Albertina Wien, Albertina, Vienna, May–June, 1924, no. 282.

Four Centuries of Miniature Painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 19–March 19, 1950, no cat., as General E. Ludlow.

International Exhibition of Miniatures: Brussels, 1912: British Section (London: W. Speaight and Sons, 1912), 13, as General Edmund Ludlow.

Leo Schidlof, Internationale Miniaturen-Ausstellung in der Albertina Wien (Vienna: Gesellschaft der Bilder- und Miniaturenfreunde, 1924), 18, as General Edmund Ludrow.

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 General E. Ludlow.

Leo Schidlof, The Miniature in Europe (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck–U. Verlagsanstalt, 1964), 1:207.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 18, p. 13, (repro.), as General E. Ludlow.