Portrait of a girl holding a peach
Painted by unknown artist of the Anglo-Netherlandish School
The 3rd Marquis of Hamilton and his wife, Lady Mary Feilding, had three daughters and then three sons: Henrietta Maria (1631-2), called after her god-mother the Queen; Anne, god-daughter of Charles I and future 3rd Duchess of Hamilton in her own right (1632-1716); Susan, later Countess of Cassillis (1633-94); Charles, Earl of Arran (1633-40); James (1634-9) and William (1635-8). The eldest daughter died as a baby, and although their father moved them to the healthier air of Chelsea after their mother's death in 1638, a few months later Basil Lord Feilding was told that the Marquis's children were 'both weake and sicklie' and all three sons were dead by late April 1640.
In the twenty-ninth case recorded in Inventory M4/21, which appears to date from the early 1640s, one of the many items is 'My Lo[rd's] 6 Childeren'. No artist is given, and at first sight it might seem that this was a group painting showing all six children, the image of Lady Henrietta Maria presumably being posthumous. However, no such picture has ever been found, portrait historians now believe that this entry refers to six separate paintings and this is borne out by Inventory M4/22, which gives some fascinating additional detail. It says plainly in the list for Case 29, 'My Lorde 6 cheldren'. The first 6 is not an item number, it is the number of pictures in the entry, for two lines down we have '16 Sextenne sea peaces' and later '10 Ten landeskapes'. Moreover, the paintings of the children come in the section headed, 'A Cathologue of the Litille peaces that war in the gallereyes'. This appears to support the speculation that the list was made at Chelsea, where we know that there were two galleries, lower and upper.
It is a pity that the six portraits are not described in any way, but they may well be the pictures enumerated in the inventory of 7 June 1759, M4/48, as hanging in a bedchamber in the upper storey of the East Wing of Hamilton Palace. These are: A Girl in Black holding her Belt with her right hand, A Girl in White with a Coral in right hand, A Child in a black Gown with a Coral in her left hand, A Girl with a whip in her hand in black, A Girl in black with a Peach in her hand and A Girl with her hands across. Although five of the sitters are said to be girls, this is probably an error. Seventeenth-century boys wore long skirts until they were four or five years old, and it is often impossible to tell the gender of very young children in portraits of the period. The first two pictures on the list and the girl with a peach are still in the Hamilton Collection but the others have gone. The 1759 Inventory gives the name of the artist of the various paintings as the early seventeenth-century Scottish portraitist George Jameson, but they are of far higher quality than his work and were re-attributed in the 1960s to an unknown artist of the Anglo-Netherlandish School.
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The painting is listed in:
Hamilton Inventory M4/21/ thirty third case
Hamilton Inventory M22/p64
Inventory of 7 June 1759 - M4/48 - Page 39
