Portrait of Mary Fitzalan, Duchess of Norfolk; After Hans Eworth.

Late 18th/early 19th century oil on canvas in original frame. Verso: an old copperplate label misidentifying the sitter as Mary, Queen of Scots.

This is a beautiful portrait of a lovely young woman .. painted within a feigned oval, the image almost glows with a luminosity.

Until now, this painting has been mistakenly considered to be a portrait of Mary Queen of Scots. Our thanks for the identification of the sitter to Edward Town who informed us that this is a later copy of the Yale Center's original, which was once in the Hamilton Collection at Lennoxlove.

The prime version was painted in1555 by HANS EWORTH, who moved to England in the 1540s, and was the most distinguished Netherlandish artist to work in England in the mid-sixteenth century. His surviving work consists mostly of portraits done between 1549-1570. About thirty-five paintings are generally attributed to him, consisting primarily of dated portraits of the English gentry and nobility. Eworth was the principal court portrait painter during the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-8).

MARY FITZALAN, born 1540, was the youngest daughter of Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel and his first wife Lady Catherine Grey. Her only brother had predeceased her which meant she and her elder sister, Jane Fitzalan were co-heiresses to the earldom of her father and later led to the merge of the Arundel earldom into the dukedom of Norfolk. Mary received an excellent education, several of her translations from Greek to Latin have been preserved, which she wrote in a beautiful Italic hand.

At the age of fifteen she married Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk. In 1557, she gave birth to son Phillip who was christened four days later at Whitehall Palace, by Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor. The two god-fathers, Felipe of Spain, after whom the boy was named, and the Earl of Arundel, his grandfather, were present for the ceremony.

The Duchess never recovered from his birth; she died, a young girl of seventeen. The Bishop of London, and the last Abbot of Westminster together conducted the funeral service, where twelve dozen torches were lit, while the choir of St Paul's sang. She was said by all to be sweet-natured and pious. 'All who knew her could not but love and esteem her much'.

{Dr EDWARD TOWN (FSA) is an art historian and curator. He currently serves as Head of Collections Information and Access and Assistant Curator for Early Modern Art at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut. Prior to joining the Center, Edward completed an AHRC-funded PhD with the University of Sussex and the National Trust on Knole in Kent, after which he joined the National Portrait Gallery as a member of their 'Making Art in Tudor Britain' project. Edward is the author of a number of articles on artistic production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries including ‘A Biographical Dictionary of London Painters 1547-1625’ (Walpole Society, 2014) and was an editor for the multi-author volume 'Painting in Britain 1500–1630'.}

SIZE: 33 x 27.5 inches including the frame.

PROVENANCE: Buckinghamshire Private Collection.