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Updated: June 17, 2025
Many of the pictures were of no value except for their associations, but I saw at least one Lely, a family group, the principal figure in which was a young lady displaying too little modesty and too much bosom. Another may have been a Vandyk, while one or two were early works representing gallants of Elizabeth's time in ruffs and feathered caps.
We know what an evil time the years after the Restoration proved in England, and it was to immortalize, as far as he could, the vain, light women of the generation that Lely lent what skill he possessed. There their pictures hang in what has been called 'the Beauty Room' at Hampton Court, and no good man or woman can look at them without holding such beauty detestable.
Lely's punishment followed him into his art, for beginning by copying Van Dyck, it is said of Lely that he degenerated in his work till it bore the very 'stamp of the depravity of the age. Lely's sitters were mostly women. Among them was one who deserved a fitter painter, Mistress Anne Killigrew, Dryden's 'Youngest virgin daughter of the skies.
Apart from these courtly attractions, Kew is one of the most interesting of the villages near London. On Kew Green once stood a house, the favourite retirement of Sir Peter Lely. In the church and cemetery, too, are interred Meyer, the celebrated miniature-painter, Gainsborough, and Zoffany.
It was a portrait by Lely, a half-length of a young man, one hand on his sword, the other holding his plumed hat. His dark chestnut hair fell on each side of a bright youthful face, full of life and health, and with eyes which, even in painting, showed what their vividness must have been.
When he and Lely painted Charles II, together, Kneller's application and rapidity of execution were so far before those of Lely, who was technically the better painter of the two, that Kneller's picture was finished when Lely's was dead-coloured only. Kneller was highly praised by Dryden, Addison, Prior, and Steele.
Not only does she prize them for their beauty and how great that is can best be seen in Christ Church Hall, upon the walls of which the works of Gainsborough, Hogarth, Lely, Reynolds and other great painters hang but from the story that they tell of the fame her sons have won, and of the love they bore her, in token of which they joyfully poured out their wealth that she might be more worthily adorned.
The countenance was singularly beautiful, and of a character of beauty eminently patrician; there was in its expression a gentleness and modesty not often found in the female portraits of Sir Peter Lely, and in the eyes and in the smile a wonderful aspect of innocent happiness.
Here also are four rich Poussins; two typical Salvator Rosa landscapes and a battle piece from the same hand; and, by some strange chance, a portrait of Oliver Cromwell by Sir Peter Lely. But the stone table again wins most attention.
The joyous look on his face was gone now his hand had fallen to his side. "It gets to be more of a muddle every day " and then he added, with the illogical reasoning of youth "all the lawyers that ever lived couldn't paint a picture like the Lely." Mrs. Horn closed her eyes.
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