Isaac Oliver, Portrait of Lady Sarah Harington, ca. 1606

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Isaac Oliver, Portrait of Lady Sarah Harington, ca. 1606,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 2, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1108.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Isaac Oliver, Portrait of Lady Sarah Harington, ca. 1606,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 2, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1108.

See the artist’s biography in volume 4.

This miniature is one of at least three known portraits of Lady Sarah Harington (1565–1629).¹ Harington was married four times and widowed three (her last husband survived her). While widowhood in early modern Britain could be a vulnerable state, it also held immense power. Unlike their married and never-married peers, widows had legal and financial autonomy. They could own property and make decisions for themselves without needing to consult a male relation.² Still, Harington’s decision to remarry not once but three times also demonstrates that while widowhood could be empowering, the financial security and aristocratic privilege gained by subsequent marriages were even more so.³

Harington used her social influence to patronize artists and writers. One of her most prominent contributions was her support of Robert Cawdrey’s dictionary—the first of its kind—in 1604.⁴ Harington was almost certainly introduced to miniaturist Isaac Oliver by her sister, Oliver’s renowned patron Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford.⁵ Oliver probably painted this miniature of Harington in about 1606, after the death of her second husband, Sir George Kingsmill. The death of her first husband, Francis, Lord Hastings, had left her with five children to raise, and her marriage to Kingsmill five years later brought stability and security to her young family. Six years after their union, Kingsmill’s death made her a rich widow,⁶ which is how she chose to appear in this portrait. Her head is crowned by a veil that drapes behind her in sheer black folds, loosely painted and shaded by Oliver.

Oliver depicts her before a red curtain, which his teacher Nicholas Hilliard (ca. 1547–1619) popularized in the mid-1590s as an alternative to the long-established blue background.⁷ Oliver employed Hilliard’s technique of floating red lake pigment onto the vellum and painting in the folds while it was still wet.⁸ He used varying amounts of black and white pigment to create a sense of dimension in Harington’s rich black gown, adding gleaming vertical folds to her satin bodice. While the black garments reveal Harington’s widowhood, they also provide visual contrast to her luxurious white accessories. A row of large pearls climbs up her shoulder, parallel to the triangle of white lace at the center of her bodice and the white ruff around her neck, which bristles with stiff layers of finely worked point lace.⁹ Rather than adding lace to the edge of starched white linen as a decorative trim, the whole ruff appears to be made of this costly, probably imported material.

Harington’s entire outfit can be understood as a display of her wealth and access to luxury goods. Despite its austerity, black was one of the most expensive dyes on the market; for mourners to dress entirely in black was the province of the elite until the discovery of aniline dyes in 1863.¹⁰ Harington’s widow’s weeds, and her ability to commission a portrait from one of England’s premier painters, put her financial and legal independence on display.

Notes

1. Cornelius Johnson, Sarah Harington, Lady Edmondo [sic], oil on copper, 2 x 1 9/16 in. (5.1 x 4 cm), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, https://collection.nationalmuseum.se/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=24906; Cornelius Johnson, Sarah Harington, Lady Edmondes, Aged 63, 1628, oil on panel, 23 13/16 x 123 3/16 in. (60.5 x 48.5 cm), National Trust, Hatchlands, Guildford, https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/sarah-harington-lady-edmondes-aged-63-217303. These two related portraits by Johnson (also known as Cornelis Janssen van Ceulen) date to the time of her fourth marriage. The large-scale painting at Hatchlands was painted the year before her death.

2. On early modern widowhood, see Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, eds., Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Abingdon, 2014).

3. Harington married Francis, Lord Hastings (1560–1595) on August 24, 1585. Charles Henry Cooper and Thompson Cooper, Athenae Cantabrigienses: 1609–1611 (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1913), 3:5. She married a second time, to Sir George Kingsmill, a Justice of the Common Pleas, in about 1600. Their marriage is probably recorded on June 14, 1600, at Saint Margaret, Westminster, London, as “Mr. George Kingsmill, Esquire” and “Ladie Jane [sic] Hastings,” perhaps the result of a scribal error. Registers and Books of St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, ref: MA/01/01/003, digitized on ancestry.com. Kingsmill died in April 1606. Alan Harding, “KINGSMILL, George (c. 1539–1606), of Burghclere, Hants, and Cripplegate, London,” The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1558-1603, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1558-1603/member/kingsmill-george-1539-1606/. Five years later, she married Edward, 11th Baron Zouche (1556–1625), in October 1611. G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom, vol. 12, pt. 2 (Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton Publishing, 2000), 949. A year after Zouche’s death, in 1626, at the age of sixty, she married her fourth and final husband, the diplomat Sir Thomas Edmondes (1563–1639), who survived her by a decade. Her name is erroneously recorded a second time as “La[dy] Theodosia Hastings,” to “Sir Thos. Edmond[e]s.” Her sister Theodosia, Lady Dudley (née Harington) or her daughter, Theodosia Hastings (who married Francis Bodenham the following year, on September 21, 1627), may have served as a witness, confusing the clerk who inscribed the marriage record. Their marriage date of September 14, 1626, follows the marriage license of Sir Thomas Edmondes to Lady Sarah Hastings, dating to three days earlier, on September 11, 1626, leaving little doubt as to the bride’s identity. Joseph Foster, London Marriage Licenses, 1521–1869 (London: B. Quaritch, 1887), 441.

4. On the Cawdrey dictionary, see Lindsay Rose Russell, Women and Dictionary-Making: Gender, Genre, and English Language Lexicography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 45–46.

5. On Lucy Harington, see Catharine MacLeod et al., Elizabethan Treasures: Miniatures by Hilliard and Oliver (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2019), 158–61.

6. Kingsmill also seems to have been a generous and supportive husband and stepfather. He not only “dealt kindly with his Lady Hastings [Sarah Harington] leaving her all his moveables (some few legacies reserved) and all his lands and leases during her life” but also left a legacy for one of her daughters by Lord Hastings, her first husband. John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:226.

7. Roy Strong and V. J. Murrell, Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered, 1520–1620 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983), 16.

8. John Murdoch, Seventeenth-Century English Miniatures in the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: H.M. Stationery Office in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1997), 70.

9. The ruff may be made of Venetian needle lace, which was popularized by Marie de’ Medici, the Italian queen of France, in the early seventeenth century. See Victor Perez Maldonado, “Medici Collar,” Fashion History Timeline, August 13, 2018, https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/medici-collar.

10. Aniline dyes were not inexpensive, but aniline black was the first to be colorfast with cotton. See “Aniline Black,” Cameo Materials Database, August 15, 2020, https://cameo.mfa.org/wiki/Aniline_black.

Thomas Hugh Cobb (1863–1944), The Manor, Davies Street, London, by 1944 [1];

Purchased at his posthumous sale, The Well-Known Collection of Fine Miniatures and Enamels, Piqué, Snuff Boxes and Objects of Vertu, Sotheby’s, London, October 12, 1944, lot 262, by “Nyburg,” 1944 [2];

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1958;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1958.

Notes

[1] Thomas Hugh Cobb, a solicitor and collector of English silver, objects of vertu and portrait miniatures, bequeathed a number of portrait miniatures, including one by Nicholas Hilliard, to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1944 (P.5-1944). The remainder of his collection, the “property of the late Thomas Hugh Cobb, Esq.” was sold at Sotheby’s by order of his executors.

[2] In the sales catalogue, lot 18 is illustrated and described as “A miniature of a Lady probably by Isaac Oliver, in widow’s robes, with black lace headdress, white lace ruff, her black dress with a string of pearls over her right shoulder, red curtain background, oval, 1 5/8 in.”

The buyer might have been either Henry Naphtalie Nyburg (b. 1909) or Solomon Nathan Nyburg (1866-1950), who ran Art Antique Galleries Ltd. at 16c Grafton Street, Bond Street, London, which was dissolved in 1964. With thanks to Bailey McCulloch for her research on the Nyburgs.

Note that lot 50, Ozias Humphry, Portrait of Mary Sackville, Countess of Thanet, is also in the Starr collection (F58-60/174).

Cornelius Johnson, Sarah Harington, Lady Edmondo [sic], n.d., oil on copper, 2 x 1 9/16 in. (5.1 x 4 cm), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Cornelius Johnson, Sarah Harington, Lady Edmondes, Aged 63, 1628, oil on panel, 23 13/16 x 123 3/16 in. (60.5 x 48.5 cm), National Trust, Hatchlands, Guildford.

Peter Oliver, A Portrait Miniature of Lady Sarah Hastings (née Harrington, 1666–1629) in Mourning Dress and Lace Widow’s Peak, n.d., gouache and bodycolor on vellum, 1 9/16 in. (4 cm), sold at Ellison Fine Art, 2019.

The Starr Foundation Collection of Miniatures, The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, December 8, 1972–January 14, 1973, no cat., no. 6, as Unknown Lady.

The Well-Known Collection of Fine Miniatures and Enamels, Piqué, Snuff Boxes and Objects of Vertu (London: Sotheby’s, October 12, 1944), 4, (repro.), as A miniature of a Lady.

Art Prices Current: A Record of Sale Prices at the Principal London and Other Auction Rooms, vol. 23 (London: Art Trade Press Ltd., 1945), A8.

Ross E. Taggart, The Starr Collection of Miniatures in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (Kansas City, MO: Nelson Gallery-Atkins Museum, 1971), no. 6, p. 11, (repro.), as Unknown Lady.

Jill Finsten, Isaac Oliver: Art at the Courts of Elizabeth I and James I (New York: Garland, 1981), no. 151, p. 166, (repro.), as Unknown Lady in Widows’ Weeds.

Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 175, (repro.).