Workshop of Christian Friedrich Zincke, Portrait of Catherine Sheffield, Duchess of Buckingham and Normanby, ca. 1730

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Workshop of Christian Friedrich Zincke, Portrait of Catherine Sheffield, Duchess of Buckingham and Normanby, ca. 1730,” 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. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.2252.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Workshop of Christian Friedrich Zincke, Portrait of Catherine Sheffield, Duchess of Buckingham and Normanby, ca. 1730,” 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. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.2252.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

The subject of this portrait by the workshop of Christian Friedrich Zincke has long been identified as the Duchess of Buckingham. Recent discoveries allow us to refine the sitter’s identity to Catherine Sheffield (née Darnley), Duchess of Buckingham and Normanby (ca. 1681–1743), the illegitimate daughter of King James II (1633–1701) and his mistress, Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester (1657–1717).¹ When Catherine Sheffield was eighteen years old, the king arranged her first marriage to James Annesley, 3rd Earl of Anglesey (1674–1702), who was so abusive that the couple had to be separated by an Act of Parliament in 1701.² Three years after Annesley’s death in 1702, she married John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1648–1721). Despite a significant gap in age, the duke and duchess were devoted to one another.³

The duchess was fixated on her royal origins and assiduously upheld standards of pomp and deportment with a zeal that was considered ridiculous even at the time.⁴ Horace Walpole colorfully described her as “more mad with pride than any mercer’s wife in Bedlam.” A scandalized Walpole recalled her appearance at the opera “en princesse, literally in robes, red velvet, and ermine,” mimicking the monarch’s robes of state.⁵ In this miniature, the duchess does not wear velvet and ermine; instead, she is ironically garbed as a pearl-bedecked shepherdess in a pastoral white silk gown laced at the front with blue ribbons, with a blue silk sash draped at her shoulder. The ensemble is a nod to the bucolic themes emerging in fashion from the French tradition of the fête galante, while the colors of her gown and sash symbolically demonstrate her nobility and purity.

Catherine Sheffield would have been about fifty years old when this miniature was painted around 1730, but it was probably not done from life. It appears somewhat flat in comparison to Zincke’s other works and closely resembles other miniatures he painted of Sheffield when she was somewhat younger, suggesting that one of Zincke’s studio assistants copied an earlier work.⁶ Unlike most enamellists, Zincke had the virtuoso skill to paint from life when he chose, despite the complex process of enameling—which required numerous firings, one for each color—increasing the risk of damage each time the miniature was put in the kiln. He did, however, also copy existing oil paintings or miniatures, as did his workshop, which may be the case for this portrait. Its superficial painting and lack of Zincke’s characteristic minutely stippled red dots, called “measles,” in the flesh tones, indicates that this miniature is a studio replica.⁷ For the original miniature, Zincke—or perhaps his patron, the Duchess of Buckingham—may have selected an earlier portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller (English, 1646–1723) as a model.⁸ Graham Reynolds has recounted that Zincke was inclined toward flattery, noting George II’s request for the artist to paint Queen Caroline as if she were twenty-eight, instead of her actual age of forty-nine, while the queen herself requested that he “make the king look twenty-four years younger.” This tendency, and the likelihood of this portrait being a later copy, may account for the sitter’s idealized appearance.⁹

Zincke painted several other portraits of Catherine, Duchess of Buckingham, including a miniature that was once in the collection of Horace Walpole and a double portrait of the duchess and her son, the Marquess of Normanby.¹⁰ A nineteenth-century engraving after another portrait of Buckingham by Zincke confirms a general resemblance in the tilt of the sitter’s head and her wide, curving brows, deep cupid’s bow, rounded chin, and angular nose. Her friend, the writer Alexander Pope, described these combined features as “most amiably majestic” (Fig. 1).¹¹

Remaining faithful to her deposed father, James II, the duchess fervently maintained the dignity of her rank all her life. Walpole recounted that, as she was dying, “she made her ladies vow to her, that if she should lie senseless, they would not sit down in the room before she was dead”—a stickler for protocol to the end.¹²

Notes

1. Catherine Sedley was the daughter of the Restoration poet Sir Charles Sedley, 5th Baronet, and Lady Catherine Savage, daughter of John Savage, 2nd Earl Rivers.

2. Thomas Sellwood, ed., Letters of Lady Rachel Russell (London: J. McCreery, 1809), 93. Their separation was on the grounds of “cruel and causeless ill usage,” meaning abuse.

3. According to their friend, the celebrated writer Alexander Pope, “whenever they [had] any difference . . . he could never stay till suppertime . . . nor till she returned back of herself into his room, but constantly left his books or business to come after her, and said, ‘Child, you and I should never fall out; and though I still think myself in the right, yet you shall have it in your way.’” Quoted in Valerie Rumbold, Women’s Place in Pope’s World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 171.

4. A conversation piece by William Hogarth (1697–1764), Three Ladies in a Grand Interior (“The Broken Fan”), ca. 1736, oil on canvas, 25 2/3 x 26 1/4 in. (65.2 × 66.7 cm) at the Tate Britain, London, T11756, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hogarth-three-ladies-in-a-grand-interior-the-broken-fan-possibly-catherine-darnley-duchess-t11756, may be a thinly veiled depiction of the Duchess of Buckingham and two other ladies, referring to the duchess’s notorious reputation for regulating manners, including dictating that a lady should keep her fan closed in her presence. In the portrait, the fan is being carried off by a dog and is pointedly left open.

5. Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, December 24, 1741, in John Wright, ed., The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford (London: Richard Bentley, 1840), 1:115.

6. For example, Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham and her Son the Duke of Buckingham, 1724, watercolor on ivory, 2 1/3 x 3 in. (6 x 7.5 cm), Ward Usher Museum, Lincolnshire.

7. We are grateful to Bernd Pappe, who examined this miniature during a July 23–25, 2023, visit. See notes in curatorial object files. On Zincke’s “measles,” see Sarah Coffin and Bodo Hofstetter, Portrait Miniatures in Enamel: The Gilbert Collection (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 33.

8. A later copy after Kneller depicting the duchess and her son, the Marquess of Normanby, bears some resemblance to the Nelson-Atkins miniature. Circle of Sir Godfrey Kneller, Duchess of Buckingham and Marquis of Normandy [sic], late 17th century, oil on canvas, 92 x 62 1/4 in. (233.68 x 158.12 cm), William R. Eubanks Interior Design, Palm Beach, Florida, accessed February 24, 2022, https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/wall-decorations/paintings/circle-sir-godfrey-kneller-duchess-buckingham-marquis-normandy/id-f_519790/.

9. Reynolds, “Zincke, Christian Frederick (1684?–1767), miniature painter,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30295.

10. The Walpole miniature is referenced in Horace Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole (Strawberry Hill: Thomas Kirgate, 1774), 127.

11. Alexander Pope, “The Character of Katharine, late Duchess of Buckinghamshire and Normanby,” in The Works of Alexander Pope, Esq. (London, 1772), 3:70–71. “There remains only to speak of her person, which was most amiably majestic: the nicest eye could find no fault in the outward lineaments of her face or proportion of her body; it was such as pleased wherever she had a desire it should; yet she never envied that of any other, which might better please in general.”

12. Horace Walpole, Earl of Orford, to Sir Horace Mann, March 14, 1743, in Wright, The Letters of Horace Walpole, 266. Emphasis original.

Probably Catherine Sheffield, Duchess of Buckingham and Normanby (ca. 1681–1743), Buckingham House, London, by 1743;

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, 1958.

Christian Friedrich Zincke, Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham and her Son the Duke of Buckingham, 1724, watercolor on ivory, 2 1/3 x 3 in. (6 x 7.5 cm), Ward Usher Museum, Lincolnshire.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 28, as Duchess of Buckingham.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 28, p. 15, (repro.), as Duchess of Buckingham.