Sir Peter Lely

Soest 1618 - London 1680

Lely, originally known as Pieter van der Faes, worked in the 1630s in Pieter de Grebber's studio in Haarlem and arrived in England in 1643. At first, Lely painted small mythological motifs and genre paintings but soon changed to portraits. He tried to become the successor of Van Dyck, who had died in 1641, continuing his manner in a more superficial and vulgarised version. The smoothly painted portraits by Lely and his studio are highly attractive for being decorative, rich in colour and full of extravagance.

After the Stuarts regained power, court life was in full flower and the market for Lely's portraits was immense. Keeping abreast of the times, Lely employed several assistants and converted his studio into an efficient mass production unit. He numbered different poses and portrait modes and had semi-finished paintings prepared in stock. When an order was received, three half-finished canvases of a half-length number 7 were retrieved from the store, for example, and only the customer's face and some individual details needed to be added. In his late production, even the countenances of his portraits are very similar. This is particularly true of his portraits of ladies, where the same sensual female figure is repeated under many guises. Lely's art has been described perhaps most quintessentially by Alexander Pope:

In days of Ease, when now the weary sword
Was sheath'd, and Luxury with Charles restored;...
Lely on an animated canvas stole
The sleepy Eye, that spoke the melting soul
No wonder then, when all was Love and Sport,
..The willing Muses were debauch'd at Court.

Pope, Alexander: Imitations of Horace, Epistle II, i, 139-52. (ed. Butts 1939, pp. 208-9)