Titan Fine Art has dated this 18th Century Female Portrait to the 18th Century.
Lady Elizabeth is shown three-quarter length in a luminous silver-white gown beside a marble-topped table, with sweeping crimson drapery, an architectural opening and landscape beyond. Her low neckline, soft white chemise, loose sleeves and relatively low coiffure accord with female fashion of Queen Anne’s reign and support a date in the first decade of the eighteenth century, when she would have been around thirty years old.
The portrait is inscribed with her identity and descent: “Elizth Shirley dau of / Robt Earl Ferrers by his / first Wife Mrs Elizabeth / Washington of Garsdon / Wilts”. The inscription must have been added after the portrait was painted, since Robert Shirley was not created Earl Ferrers until 1711. Closely comparable pale-gold genealogical inscriptions occur on portraits of Lady Elizabeth’s sister, Lady Catherine Shirley, and her brother Washington Shirley, suggesting a later Ferrers-family programme of identifying ancestral portraits.
Her maternal ancestry gives the portrait a notable transatlantic association. Elizabeth Washington of Garsdon belonged to a collateral branch of the same extended English Washington family from which George Washington, first President of the United States, later descended.
The picture was very probably associated with the Shirley family collection at Staunton Harold, Leicestershire. The rare catalogue of the Earl Ferrers sale held there on 17–18 June 1834 included several portraits of Lady Elizabeth Shirley, including lot 50, “Lady Elizabeth Shirley”, and lot 69, “the Daughter of Robert, first Earl Ferrers”, both then attributed to Jan van der Vaart. As no dimensions were recorded, the present portrait cannot be securely identified with a specific lot.
By 4 June 1976 the painting was unquestionably at Christie’s, London, where it appeared as lot 26 in the Old Master Pictures sale, attributed to Michael Dahl and described as “Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Shirley, daughter of Robert, Earl Ferrers, three-quarter length, in a white dress leaning on a marble table”, 49 x 40 in. The Christie’s catalogue cutting remains attached to the reverse and the stretcher retains the corresponding chalk lot number “26”.
The present attribution to the Circle of Sir Godfrey Kneller reflects the painting’s close relationship to the Knellerian portrait tradition: its scale, controlled pose, architectural setting, rich red drapery and luminous satin are characteristic of the sophisticated Anglo-Dutch portrait language that dominated aristocratic portraiture in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Lady Elizabeth later married Walter Clarges, a younger son of Sir Walter Clarges, 1st Baronet. She died in London in 1740 and was buried at Winchester Cathedral, where her ledger stone recorded the Shirley arms.
Presented in a substantial giltwood frame, this is far more than an anonymous decorative portrait: it offers monumental presence, excellent condition, documented Christie’s provenance, probable Ferrers family history, and an unusually personal connection to both British aristocratic and transatlantic history.
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Titan Fine Art has dated this 18th Century Female Portrait to the 18th Century.
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Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Shirley on a Porch by a Marble Table C.1705–10; Circle of Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), Inscribed
