Portrait of Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and later Duchess of Cleveland (1640-1709), full-length, seated in a silver dress and blue drapery, a landscape beyond

This elegant portrait captures the likeness of one of the most powerful and influential women at the court of King Charles II: Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and later Duchess of Cleveland. It was executed by the king’s Principal Painter, Sir Peter Lely, shortly after Charles II’s triumphant restoration to his throne in May 1660 following the Protectorate. Lely was the natural successor to Charles I’s Principal Painter, Sir Anthony van Dyck, and his portraits of the king, his family, mistresses and other key courtiers reflected and contributed to their sitters’ power and notoriety, and collectively celebrated the Restoration court.

Barbara Villiers was one of the king’s most celebrated mistresses. She must have come to his attention shortly after her marriage to Roger Palmer (1634-1705), a royalist and lawyer, in 1659. It is unclear how or where she first met Charles, however he acknowledged her first daughter, Anne, born 25 February 1661, a birth date that indicates that their affair must have begun within two or three weeks of his arrival in London on 29 May 1660 following years of exile in France, the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands during the Protectorate, if not earlier (S.M. Wynne, Oxford DNB online). She became Countess of Castlemaine on her husband’s ennoblement in 1661, with the title limited to Palmer’s male heirs by Barbara. When Charles II’s new queen, Catherine of Braganza, arrived in England in May 1662, Barbara petitioned to be appointed a Lady of the Bedchamber of Catherine in order to secure her position as the king’s acknowledged mistress, a position she was duly granted the following year. By May 1663, Barbara had moved into apartments in Whitehall situated over Holbein’s Gatehouse, where Charles frequently dined. She bore Charles five children between 1661 and 1665, all of whom received titles and privileges worthy of a king’s offspring. Her political influence between 1660 and 1670 was undeniable, but was largely motivated by her desire to secure wealth and status for herself and her children rather than a genuine predilection for politics. She also used her favour with the king on behalf of others, for instance influencing the appointment of her great-uncle, Henry Glemham, as Bishop of St Asaph in 1667. Barbara remained the most powerful among a number of women Charles courted before 1672, when Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, arrived from France and Barbara was created Duchess of Cleveland, Countess of Southampton and Baroness Nonsuch in her own right in August 1670.

By the time of the Restoration of the Monarchy in England in 1660, which heralded a new artistic age with the pleasure-loving court of Charles II at its epicentre, Lely had established himself as the pre-eminent court painter ‘in large’ (on a life-scale) in the country, with the most prosperous business and the most influential patrons. King Charles II granted him an annual pension of £200 in October 1661 as the King’s Principal Painter ‘as formerly to Van Dyck’, as well as naturalisation. Barbara formed a mutually beneficial partnership with Lely, who painted a series of portraits of her in the guise of the Magdalen, Madonna, a ‘Sultana’ and Saint Catherine (fig. 1) during the 1660s, which alluded to and reinforced her standing as the king’s principal mistress. In their catalogue of the exhibition Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II, Catharine MacLeod and Julia Alexander summed up the relationship as follows: ‘she acted as his muse and he, in turn, effectively as her promoter’ (‘Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland’, exhibition catalogue, London and New Haven, 2001, p. 116). Indeed, Barbara was a woman whose ‘sweetness and exquisite beauty’ were, according to Lely, ‘beyond the compass of art’ (cited in loc. cit.). One (now anonymous) writer even claimed that: ‘Sir Peter Lilly when he had painted the Duchess of Clevelands picture, he put something of Clevelands face as her Languishing Eyes into every one Picture, so that all his pictures had an Air one of another' (loc. cit.).

This portrait type is central to Lely’s iconography of Castlemaine and has even been described as her ‘signature image’ (ibid., p. 118). It was the first in a group of portraits Lely painted of her. The sitter’s physiognomy corresponds closely with that in two miniatures of a similarly early date by Samuel Cooper – one finished and dated 1661 and another unfinished, both in the Royal Collection – which Lely may have used as aids. The original portrait may have been painted to celebrate Barbara’s new title when her husband was made Earl of Castlemaine in December 1661. While it appears to be a straightforward portrait of a woman dressed in contemporary clothing, the sitter’s pose – with her head resting on her hand – is in fact laden with aesthetic and allegorical allusions, which the original audience would have been attuned to. The pose had its origins in depictions of both Melancholia and the Penitent Magdalen. Associations with the latter saint are reinforced through the sitter’s long, flowing tresses (which provided the Magdalen’s only cover during her time in the desert). Allusions to the Magdalen implied a flattering link between Castlemaine and the king, positing him as Christ to her as Mary. The popularity of this portrait type is attested to by the number of autograph and studio replicas and variants that exist. Lely ran a carefully orchestrated workshop to cater to his growing clientele and the current portrait would likely have been produced within the established studio practices of his day, with Lely executing the most significant elements, notably the head and hands, and studio assistants laying in other passages, such as the drapery.

This portrait is first recorded in the collection of James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife in the peerage of Ireland, who succeeded his father, the first earl, in 1763, inheriting a large accumulation of estates in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire assembled over three generations since the late seventeenth century. Only with his elevation as Baron Fife in the peerage of Great Britain in 1790 was he entitled to sit in the House of Lords. Despite marriages in successive generations to daughters of more distinguished Scottish families, Fife was aware of the former obscurity of his own; and this may have fortified his determination to collect historic portraits. By 1798, when the first edition of the Catalogue of the Portraits & Prints in the Different Houses belonging to James Earl of Fife was printed, a very considerable collection had been assembled. Acquisitions continued to be made and a second edition was issued in 1807. It is evident that Fife himself prepared the catalogue, which he dedicated to Benjamin West. His own preface suggests what he sought for in the pursuit of portraits and attests to his interest in fashions both of the arrangement of hair and of costume. This portrait was in the North Drawing Room at Duff House, the ambitious mansion near Banff built for his father by William Adam in 1735-9.