Portrait of Olivia Boteler Porter
Anthony van Dyck, 1630
This portrait of Olivia Boteler Porter, painted by Anthony van Dyck in 1630, shows the wife of Sir Endymion Porter, a friend of the painter. Olivia was the daughter of John Boteler, 1st Baron Boteler of Bramfield, and the niece of the Duke of Buckingham. A devout Roman Catholic, she served as a lady in waiting to Henrietta Maria of France, consort of Charles I of England.
The work is an oil on canvas of modest size, roughly 72 by 61 centimetres, and belongs to the court portraiture that Van Dyck practised in England, where he worked for Charles I. The available sources focus mainly on the identity of the sitter and on the recent history of the picture, so it is best not to ascribe specific compositional details that cannot be confirmed.
What makes the painting remarkable is its路 journey. For years it sat in storage at the Bowes Museum in Teesside, unseen by the public, covered in layers of varnish and dirt and never restored. It was first thought to be a copy and given a modest valuation. After cleaning, Christopher Brown, director of the Ashmolean Museum, confirmed it as a van Dyck, and its estimated value rose to around one million pounds.
The rediscovery came in 2013, when the art historian Bendor Grosvenor spotted the picture on Your Paintings, an online catalogue created by the Public Catalogue Foundation to document every oil painting in public ownership in the United Kingdom. Thanks to that cataloguing work, a forgotten picture in a store was brought back into the recognised output of the Flemish painter.
- Painter
- Anthony van Dyck
- Date
- 1630
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 72 × 61 cm
- Museum
- Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle
- Movement
- Baroque
- Genre
- portrait
- Depicts
- Olivia Boteler Porter
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