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Updated: June 17, 2025
His fine person bore the marks of age, sickness, and sorrow; and he mourned for his departed beauty with an effeminate regret. He could not look without a sigh at the portrait which Lely had painted of him when he was only twenty-eight, and often murmured, Quantum mutatus ab illo.
There is a beautiful drawing-room, and all these apartments are adorned with pictures, the collection being especially rich in portraits by Sir Peter Lely, that of Nell Gwynn being one, who is one of the few beautiful women whom I have seen on canvas.
"The dear old home?" she cries, though she had been in it but once before, regarding lovingly each object as her eye rested upon it, nay, caressingly when she came to the great punch-bowl and the carved mahogany dresser, and the Peter Lely over the broad fireplace. "What memories they must bring to your mind, my dear," she remarks to her husband.
The line is not easily drawn, and few subjects for the biographer can ever desire to be as candidly dealt with by him as Cromwell acted with Sir Peter Lely, in the request to be painted as he was, warts and all. Thus, too often the result will be but biography written in vacuo, 'the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire.
There was one of a great grandmother of mine, who was the Speaker's sister, painted by Sir P. Lely, that was one of the best portraits I ever saw. I am to have a copy of this picture next spring. I shall appoint Gregg on Monday to meet me on business, and I will therefore defer talking upon that subject till I have seen him. Storer dined with me to-day.
Suddenly she saw the drawing-room at Fontenoy, green and gold and cool, with the portraits on the wall, Edmund Churchill, who fought with King Charles; Henry his son, who fled to Virginia and founded the family there; a second Edmund, aide-de-camp to Marlborough; two Governors of Virginia and a President of the Council; the Lely and the Kneller both Churchill women; and the fair face and form of Grandaunt Jacqueline for whom she was named.
Sir Peter Lely, a famous painter in the reign of Charles I., agreed for the price of a full-length, which he was to draw for a rich alderman of London, who was not indebted to nature either for shape or face. When the picture was finished, the alderman endeavoured to beat down the price; alleging that if he did not purchase it, it would lie on the painter's hands.
The pencil of Sir Peter Lely has left a splendid full-length likeness of James II. George IV. is suspended from a peg in the wall, looking as if it was fresh from the hands of Sir Thomas Lawrence, its admirable painter. I was now in St. George's Hall, and I gazed upward to view the beautiful figures on the ceiling, until my neck was nearly out of joint.
He thought, however, he should find them a little higher up the river." Lely's Portrait of Cromwell is thus introduced in the second volume: "Oliver now stood erect, with his back to a fire-place, and resembled the picture which had been lately painted of him by Lely.
On the walls hung the portraits of the Scroopes for many generations past, some in armour, some in their robes of state, ladies with stiff bodices and high head-dresses, not beauties by Lely or warriors and statesmen by Kneller, but wooden, stiff, ungainly, hideous figures, by artists whose works had, unfortunately, been more enduring than their names.
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