This captivating portrait by the leading late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century court artist, Sir Godfrey Kneller, shows Kneller�s delicate and intimate approach to his female faces, and is very like his individual portrait drawings with their emphasis on sharp features and alluring eyes. The sitter is unencumbered by high fashion or a background of stately topography. The emphasis is instead placed directly on the alluring femininity, and enhanced by the loose drapery and falling hair around her shoulder.Over a white smock with voluminous sleeves, the sitter is wearing a cobalt blue silk gown with slashed sleeves held with huge diamond claps and pearl clasps on the bodice. At her breast she holds the gauze scarf that has been draped around her left shoulder. The hairstyle, known as the hurluberlu, first appeared around 1671. In the celebrated letters of Madame de S�vign� she accounted �Now just imagine the hair parted peasant fashion to within two inches of the back roll; the hair each side is cut in layers and made into round loose curls which hang about an inch below the ear; it looks very young and pretty - two bouquets of hair on each side... a large curl on top which sometimes falls down the neck.�The fashionable hairstyle and clothing exude a sense of status and Augustan decorum and help to date this portrait to circa 1675 to 1685. This portrait was painted at the cusp of a new style� the Augustan style, which is generally taken to begin with the formation of a sophisticated metropolitan culture based partly on the new political order introduced by the constitutional settlement of 1688/9. Soon, sitters were to be portrayed no longer as a glittering court beauty with minutiae of fashion and fabric, but rather more restrained with a sense of simplicity and harmony, and Kneller excelled at this. Contemporary critics described Kneller�s work as a �nobler Beauty.� Nevertheless, bad dress equalled bad manners and the aims of the Augustan soci...