Bernard Lens III, Portrait of a Woman with Her Dog, ca. 1728

Chicago:

Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, “Bernard Lens III, Portrait of a Woman with Her Dog, ca. 1728,” 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. 3, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1442.

MLA:

Marcereau DeGalan, Aimee. “Bernard Lens III, Portrait of a Woman with Her Dog, ca. 1728,” 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. 3, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1442.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

Bernard Lens III was a highly skilled artist who offered a wide range of services to his clients: creating original miniature likenesses; reproducing larger works by notable artists like Sir Anthony Van Dyck (Flemish, 1599–1641), Godfrey Kneller (German, 1646–1723), and Michael Dahl (Swedish, 1659–1743), among others; and providing drawing lessons and framing advice.¹ It is unclear whether this miniature of a woman with her dog is an original likeness or a copy after a larger oil painting, as it resembles several other compositions the artist created.²

The young woman poses affectionately with her toy spaniel against a landscape background. A tree frames the scene on the right, with a clump of pink roses at its base, and a mountain vista appears in the left background as a line of birds fly off into the distance. Clad in a white satin dress with a brilliant blue ribbon, the sitter wears a voluminous headdress of the same blue that falls in front of her left shoulder.³

Lens approached the notoriously difficult medium of ivory cautiously, beginning with graphite to outline the subject.⁴ He added gum arabic to his pigments to create smoother adhesion between the ivory and the paint, resulting in a more brilliant, glossy, and transparent watercolor with greater depth of color. He used touches of gold for highlights and to edge the composition, as well as in his monogram at the lower left. Stippling and hatching define the sitter’s facial features, and while Lens used only watercolor on the bare ivory face (with no carnation ground layer), he added bodycolor to increase the opacity of the pigment elsewhere, including the wonderfully rich and textured fur of the sitter’s doting spaniel.

The toy spaniel was a popular pet during this period. The dog’s loyal expression and the way the sitter’s hand delicately rests on its back communicate desirable attributes for a young woman who would one day become a wife. These types of portraits could thus serve as marketing tools for parents hoping to marry off their daughters, and they appear frequently in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century courts of Europe, as well as among members of the bourgeoisie.⁵ The specific type of spaniel in Lens’s portrait is a Cavalier King Charles, so called because of its resemblance to Charles II’s spaniel during the English Civil War.⁶ Its black-and-white coloring (with brown cheeks), however, suggests that the sitter is someone other than Sarah Jenyns Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, one of Lens’s most important patrons, whose husband, the Duke of Marlborough, was known to keep red-and-white spaniels for hunting at their estate, Blenheim Palace.⁷

Lens was also patronized by the important collector Edward Harley, later second Earl of Oxford, whose wife, Lady Henrietta Harley, bears a striking resemblance to the present sitter based on another portrait of her by Lens⁸—although it is uncertain whether she ever owned a dog (1717; Portland Collection).⁹ In addition to the physical similarity between Harley and the sitter in the present miniature, and their nearly identical treatment of hair, there are many compositional similarities between the two portraits, with the use of the tree and roses as a framing device. These strategies, however, also appear in several of the artist’s other works from the late 1720s, in which he sometimes exchanged dogs for children, enhancing the maternal characteristics of the main figure.¹⁰

While today the miniature is in a modern setting, it is likely to have been originally situated inside an ivory or tortoiseshell snuffbox, due to its elliptical shape.¹¹ Even in its original setting, the sitter’s identity and that of her canine companion would have been known only to a select few.

Notes

1. Marjorie Wieseman, “Bernard Lens’s Miniatures for the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 10, no. 2 (Summer 2018): https://www.doi.org/10.5092/jhna.2018.10.2.3.

2. The Nelson-Atkins painting is closest in spirit to the work of painter Michael Dahl (Swedish, 1659–1743), whose many portraits of women often include dogs. See Michael Dahl, Portrait of a Woman, oil on canvas, 77 1/4 x 51 3/4 in. (196.2 x 131.4 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 56.224.1, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436077.

3. Bernard Lens was particularly fascinated with headdresses, completing a series of thirty drawings that he published under the title “The Exact Head Dress of ye British Court Ladyes and Quality Drawn from the Life at the Court Opera and Theatre in the Years 1725, 26, 27 by Bernard Lens.” The original drawings are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and a copy of the publication is in the Royal Collections. A later edition of the book from 1725 exists by John L. Nevinson, The Exact Dress of the Head [Drawn] by Bernard Lens, 1725 (London: Costume Society in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1970).

4. By the time Lens painted the present portrait, he had been working on ivory for about twenty years. Bernard Lens III’s earliest dated portrait miniature is Portrait of Dr. Harris, 1707, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, inv. B1974.2.66, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:11618, cited in Wieseman, “Bernard Lens’s Miniatures.”

5. For more on the prevalence of dogs and other pets at court, see Katharine MacDonogh, “A Woman’s Life: The Role of Pets in the Lives of Royal Women at the Courts of Europe from 1400–1800,” in Animals and Courts: Europe, c. 1200–1800, ed. Mark Hengerer and Nadir Weber (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2020), 323–42. For examples of artists who included dogs in portraits with bourgeois women, see Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Anne (Killigrew) Kirke, ca. 1637, 87 1/2 x 51 3/8 in. (222.3 x 130.5 cm), Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA, 83.4; Godfrey Kneller, An Unknown Lady in an Orange Dress with a Lap Dog, ca. 1735–1740, 49 1/2 x 39 1/2 in. (125.7 x 100.3 cm), National Trust, Middlethorpe Hall, North Yorkshire, NT 1548248, https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1548248; Nicolas de Largillierre, La Belle Strasbourgeoisie, 1703, 54 5/16 x 41 3/4 in. (138 x 106 cm), Musée de Beaux Arts, Strausbourg, MBA 2146, https://musees-strasbourg.skin-web.org/document/mba-2146/5ee338d7461cda28a3ab1f98; Jan Van Mieris, Woman Holding a Dog in a Landscape, ca. 1583–85, 10 5/8 x 8 5/32 in. (27 x 20.7 cm), Leiden Collection, JM-100, https://www.theleidencollection.com/artwork/a-woman-holding-a-dog-in-a-landscape/.

6. His supporters were also called Cavaliers. Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, online edition, s.v. “cavalier,” accessed March 3, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/cavalier-English-horseman.

7. Norma Moffat, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel: Your Happy Healthy Pet, 2nd ed. (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2006), 19.

8. See Bernard Lens III, Henrietta Hawley and Her Daughter Margaret, 1717, watercolor on vellum, Portland Collection, Welbeck Estate, as cited in Richard W. Goulding, “The Welbeck Abbey Miniatures,” Volume of the Walpole Society 4 (1914): 141, cat. no. 188.

9. Edward Harley knew Lens’s father (Lens II), from whom he received drawing lessons in 1707. As a result of this connection, the younger Lens undertook a number of commissions for Harley and his family between 1714 and 1728; see Wieseman, “Bernard Lens’s Miniatures.”

10. See also Lens’s portrait of Lady Catherine Darnley, Duchess of Buckingham, with her child, also in the Portland Collection, which is compositionally similar to the present portrait and that of Lady Henrietta. He added in an image of the family seat in both these portraits and exchanged young children with a toy spaniel. See Lady Catherine Darnley, Duchess of Buckingham, and her son Edmund, Second Duke of Buckingham, n.d., watercolor on ivory, Portland Collection, Welbeck Estate, as cited in Goulding, “Welbeck Abbey Miniatures,” 202, cat. no. 363.

11. I am grateful to Carol Aiken and Elle Shushan, who discussed the current setting of the Nelson-Atkins miniature during their respective visits in 2017 and 2018 to survey the miniatures collection. See survey reports in NAMA curatorial files. Among the archives at Welbeck are several bills from Lens, which indicate that he framed, as well as painted, many miniatures for the 2nd Earl of Oxford. These also reveal his pricing structure. For example, in 1719, Lens charged twenty guineas for “a large half-length of Mathew Prior, Esqr., on a large skin of vellum”; in 1729, Lens charged five guineas each for several portraits. See Goulding, “Welbeck Abbey Miniatures,” 41.

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.

Four Centuries of Miniature Painting, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 19–March 19, 1950, unnumbered, as Lady with a Dog.

British Portrait Miniatures: An Exhibition Arranged for the Period of the Edinburgh International Festival, The Arts Council of Great Britain, Edinburgh, August 20–September 18, 1965, no. 160, as Portrait of a Lady with a Dog.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 35, as Unknown Lady with Dog.

Four Centuries of Miniature Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1950), 6, as Lady with a Dog.

British Portrait Miniatures: An Exhibition Arranged for the Period of the Edinburgh International Festival, exh. cat. (Edinburgh: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1965), unpaginated, as Portrait of a Lady with a Dog.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 35, p. 17, (repro.), as Unknown Lady with Dog.