William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630), full-length, in a black doublet and hose, holding the Lord Stewart's staff of office

Details

After Sir Anthony van Dyck
William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580-1630), full-length, in a black doublet and hose, holding the Lord Stewart's staff of office
with identifying inscription 'William Earl of Pembroke' (lower right, on the base of the pedestal)
oil on canvas
86 ¼ x 51 in. (219.1 x 129.5 cm.)
in a carved giltwood frame

Provenance

Probably commissioned by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon (1609-1674), Clarendon House, London, and by descent (see lot 141 for full provenance).

Literature

Clarendon State Papers, Bodleian MS Clarendon 92, ff 253-254, no. 34.
Sir W. Musgrave, Lists of Portraits, BM Add. MS 6391, ff. 76-77, no. 59 (listed as hanging at The Grove, 1764).
G. P. Harding, List of Portraits, Pictures in Various Mansions in the United Kingdom, unpublished MS, 1804, II, p. 210.
J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French Painters, London, 1831, III, p. 145, no. 517, as Van Dyck.
Lady T. Lewis, Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, London, 1852, III, pp. 254, 300-1.
P. Toynbee, 'Horace Walpole's journals of visits to country seats, ', Walpole Society, XVI, 1927, p. 38.
R. Gibson, Catalogue of Portraits in the Collection of the Earl of Clarendon, Wallop, 1977, p. 101-2, no. 112, illustrated.
O. Millar, in S.J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck, A complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven and London, 2004, p. 569, under no. IV.180.

Exhibited

Plymouth, City Art Gallery, Paintings from the Clarendon Collection, 1954, no. 18.

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Lot Essay

William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke was an important patron of the arts and member of the Whitehall group, the circle around King Charles I who introduced a taste for the Italian old masters to England. He was, with his brother Philip Herbert, 1st Earl of Montgomery, a dedicatee of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. Pembroke served as Lord Chamberlain from 1615 to 1625 and, with King James I, was the founder of his eponymous college at Oxford.

The prototype for this painting seems to have been posthumously painted by van Dyck and his studio, presumably for his brother Philip Herbert, the 4th Earl of Pembroke, one of the painter’s greatest patrons, for the Pembroke family house, Wilton. It was most probably based on a now lost likeness by Daniel Mytens, the leading portraitist of the day before van Dyck’s arrival in England. Comparable portraits of the sitter at Hardwicke Hall and the National Portrait Gallery by Mytens and his circle give credence to this hypothesis.

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