Samuel Cooper, Portrait of Lord Henry Howard, later 6th Duke of Norfolk, ca. 1663

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Samuel Cooper, Portrait of Lord Henry Howard, later 6th Duke of Norfolk, ca. 1663,” 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/10.37764/8322.5.1206.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Samuel Cooper, Portrait of Lord Henry Howard, later 6th Duke of Norfolk, ca. 1663,” 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: 10.37764/8322.5.1206.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Once thought to be a portrait of Henry Frederick Howard, 15th Earl of Arundel (1608–1652),¹ the subject of this portrait can now be confidently identified as his son, Lord Henry Howard (1628–1684), later 6th Duke of Norfolk, based on his youthful appearance and the style of the conjoined SC monogram, which the artist Samuel Cooper adopted after 1653.² Shown in his early to mid-thirties, the sitter wears a style of ribbon-tied cravat popularized by supporters of King Charles II in the early 1660s.³

Born a second son to Henry Frederick Howard and Lady Elizabeth Stuart, Henry Howard experienced a change of fortune in 1645 when the family confined his elder brother, Lord Thomas Howard to an asylum for life due to mental instability. Upon their father’s death in 1652, Thomas became Earl of Arundel, but due to his incarceration he was prohibited from exercising his rights as earl, and later duke, or continuing the family line by marrying and having children.⁴ As a result, Henry became the acting head of the family, taking on the management of a struggling estate without the legitimacy conferred by his brother’s titles.⁵

As a scion of the most prominent Catholic Royalist family in Britain, Henry Howard was encumbered by oppressive debts from the Howards’ longstanding refusal to convert to Anglicanism and their involvement in the English Civil War.⁶ He also inherited debts incurred by his grandfather, Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, whose passion for collecting rivaled only that of King Charles I.⁷ Following his grandfather’s legacy of artistic patronage, young Henry commissioned portraits from the most celebrated court painters of his time, including Sir Peter Lely (Dutch, active in England, 1618–1680), John Michael Wright (1617–1694), and Samuel Cooper, among others.⁸

In this miniature, Cooper depicts Henry Howard in a gleaming suit of armor, a symbol of aristocratic wealth and prestige. Rather than using gold or silver pigments to render the burnished plate and gilt rivets, Cooper employed his characteristic technique, using lead white and non-metallic pigments to create the appearance of reflective surfaces.⁹ Over time, some areas of highlights have oxidized to black, but the overall effect is an impressive reminder of Cooper’s mastery of the watercolor medium.¹⁰ The stark black background, typical of Cooper’s miniatures at this time, amplifies the iridescent sheen of the armor.

By the second half of the seventeenth century, such costly plate armor was worn largely for ceremonial purposes.¹¹ Howard’s chosen attire therefore proclaims his pedigree.¹² This particular garniture was fundamental to the family’s self-image, having been worn by his father and grandfather thirty years earlier in portraits by Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, active in England, 1599–1641) and John Michael Wright, respectively.¹³ Wright also painted a half-length portrait of Howard in the family armor around 1660, and together it and the Cooper miniature suggest that Howard was staking a claim as head of the Howard family through portraiture as England transitioned from the austerity of Oliver Cromwell’s Interregnum to the gaiety of a new royal court.

In 1660, King Charles II was restored to the English throne. The supporters who had followed him into exile, like Howard, now styled themselves as “Cavaliers,” often with a flowing hairstyle and ribbon-tied cravats, as seen in this portrait—badges of pride and victory, in contrast to the sober, puritanical Roundheads, who eschewed embellishment. In his portrait by Cooper, Lord Henry Howard marks this new era of Stuart portraiture by asserting himself as his father’s successor, deploying the symbolism of the family armor to secure his own—and his family’s—legacy.

Notes

1. This miniature was published with its previous title, Henry Frederick, Earl of Arundel, in Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), 11.

2. Prior to 1653, Cooper used a monogram with his initials appearing sequentially (SC) rather than overlaid. See John Murdoch, Seventeenth-Century English Miniatures in the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: H.M. Stationery Office in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1997), 115. The intertwined monogram on this portrait confirms the identity of the sitter since the elder Henry Frederick Howard died in 1652.

3. Daphne Foskett suggests that this style was not popular until about 1663, which indicates that the miniature dates to about this time. Daphne Foskett, ed., Samuel Cooper and His Contemporaries, exh. cat. (London: H.M. Stationery Office and National Portrait Gallery, 1974), 47.

4. Lord Thomas Howard’s diagnosis is unknown, but he may have been mentally ill or disabled. Such conditions were poorly understood and even feared at this time and were considered an existential threat to the stability of aristocratic family lines. The extent of his supposed incapacity is unclear; there were attempts in the 1670s to reinstate his inheritance, and supporters claimed that the severity of his condition had been grossly exaggerated or even falsified. John Miller, “Howard, Henry, sixth duke of Norfolk (1628–1684), nobleman,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, September 23, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13907.

5. Initially inheriting the title of 16th Earl of Arundel after his father’s death in 1652, Lord Thomas Howard was created 5th Duke of Norfolk—a title that had been forfeited by the family in 1572—by King Charles II in 1660. His titles passed to Lord Henry Howard upon his death in 1677. Miller, “Howard, Henry.”

6. Beginning with the Act of Uniformity instituted by Elizabeth I in 1559, English Catholics were fined, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for refusing to attend Anglican services, a crime called recusancy. Many properties and estates were confiscated. The Howards, who held the hereditary title of Earl Marshal, were the highest-ranking aristocratic family in Britain and therefore faced the most severe consequences for their refusal to convert. The family was also targeted by Cromwell’s Parliament as leading courtiers and supporters of Charles I, and they spent the Interregnum in exile abroad. See John Cedric H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond and Briggs, 1976). For an overview of the English Civil War, see Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603–1714 (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 13–239.

7. Miller, “Howard, Henry.” On Arundel and Charles I as prolific collectors and competitors, see Jonathan Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Parliament had largely dispersed Arundel’s extraordinary collection while the family was in exile on the European continent, but Henry Howard eventually inherited what remained of it.

8. Portraits of Lord Henry Howard by Sir Peter Lely (1677) and Adrian Hanneman (1660) are at Arundel Castle in Sussex. Wright’s portrait (ca. 1660) was with The Weiss Gallery, London, as of January 2021; see n. 12.

9. V. J. Murrell, “Cooper’s Painting Technique,” in Foskett, ed., Samuel Cooper and his Contemporaries, xix.

10. The likelihood of oxidation was suggested in conversation with conservator Carol Aiken during a survey of the collection conducted in 2017, notes in NAMA curatorial files. It is probably lead white but cannot be confirmed without pigment analysis.

11. It was ineffectual in battle against the newly invented flintlock musket.

12. The Weiss Gallery suggests that the armor may have belonged to John Michael Wright, but this seems unlikely considering that it was worn by multiple generations of the family. Peter Finer, Valour: Old Master Portraits Featuring Arms and Armour (London: The Weiss Gallery, 2020), 93, https://issuu.com/theweissgallery/docs/valour_digital_catalogue.

13. John Michael Wright, Lord Henry Howard, Later 6th Duke of Norfolk (1628–1684), ca. 1660, oil on canvas, previously with The Weiss Gallery, London; Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Double Portrait of Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, with His Grandson, Thomas Howard, Later 16th Earl of Arundel and 5th Duke of Norfolk, 1635–1636, oil on canvas, Arundel Castle; Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait of Henry Frederick Howard, 15th Earl of Arundel, 1632–1635, oil on canvas, private collection.

Philip Henry Howard (1801–1883), Corby Castle, Great Corby, Cumbria, England, by June 1865 [1];

With Duveen Brothers, London, by 1912 [2];

Hans Freiherr Reitzes von Marienwert (1877–1935), Vienna, Austria, by 1924–at least 1928 [3];

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, 1958.

Notes

[1] The inscription on the gesso backing ascribing ownership to “P. H. Howard of Corby” identifies the Nelson-Atkins miniature as the Cooper loaned by Philip Henry Howard, Esq. of Corby Castle to the landmark exhibition of miniatures at the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) in June 1865, as Henry Frederick, Earl of Arundel (1608–1652), no. 1396. Howard (1801–1883) was a Whig politician and descendant of Lord William Howard, younger son of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1536–1572), and therefore not a direct descendant of the sitter Henry Howard, Sixth Duke of Norfolk. It is possible that the miniature was inherited through the family or acquired by P. H. Howard’s father Henry Howard (1757–1842), a historian and antiquarian who wrote Indications of Memorials . . . of Persons of the Howard Family, a family history privately printed in 1834.

[2] 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 International Miniatures Exhibition in Brussels. Duveen Brothers, Miniatures, undated, Special Collections, Series I.A., Box 15, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

[3] 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), and its owner was also identified as von Marienwert in 1928 in Jean de Bourgoing, English Miniatures (London: Ernest Benn, Ltd., 1928), pl. 40. Several other miniatures cited on the same page of the Duveen stock album [see 2] 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, which 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, a 1657 portrait of a woman by John Hoskins, which was recently sold as lot 216 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 Heckett. If the Hoskins was acquired at the same time as the Nelson-Atkins Portrait of Henry Howard, which seems likely, those dates could apply to our miniature as well. Finally, Nicholas Dixon’s Portrait of Sir George Wakeham, 1679, illustrated on page 38 of the Duveen stock album, which was also recently sold at part II of the Pohl-Ströher sale at Sotheby’s, July 4, 2019, lot 17, shares a similar provenance, having been owned by Duveen, Marienwart, and Heckett.

Special Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures, South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), London, June 1865, no. 1396.

International Exhibition of Miniatures, Brussels, 1912, no. 56, erroneously as Henry Frederick Earl of Arundel.

Internationale Miniaturen-Austellung in der Albertina Wien, Albertina, Vienna, May–June 1924, no. 158, erroneously as Henry Frederick, Earl of Arundel.

Four Centuries of Miniature Painting, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 19–March 19, 1950, no cat., erroneously as Henry Frederick, Earl of Arundel.

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

Samuel Cooper and His Contemporaries, National Portrait Gallery, London, March 15–June 15, 1974, no. 104, erroneously as Henry Frederick Howard, 3rd Earl of Arundel.

South Kensington Museum, Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Portrait Miniatures, exh. cat. (London: Whittingham and Wilkins, 1865), no. 1396.

International Exhibition of Miniatures: Brussels, 1912: British Section, exh. cat. (London: W. Speaight and Sons, 1912), 9.

J. J. Foster, Samuel Cooper and the English Miniature Painters of the XVII Century (London: Dickinsons, 1914–1916), 44, 47.

Leo Schidlof, Internationale Miniaturen-Ausstellung in der Albertina Wien, exh. cat. (Vienna: Gesellschaft der Bilder- und Miniaturenfreunde, 1924), 11.

Jean de Bourgoing, English Miniatures (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), pl. 40, (repro.).

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), 265.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 11, p. 11, (repro.), erroneously as Henry Frederick, Earl of Arundel.

Daphne Foskett, ed., Samuel Cooper and His Contemporaries, exh. cat. (London: H.M. Stationery Office and National Portrait Gallery, 1974), 47, (repro.).

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.).