Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester (1657-1717)
Sir Godfrey Kneller (Lübeck 1646 - London 1723)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1685 (signed and dated)
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
1397 x 1143 mm (55 x 45 in)
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire
NT 108811
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester (1657-1717) by Sir Godfrey Kneller (Lübeck 1646/9 - London 1723), signed and dated 1685. A three-quarter-length portrait of a young woman, later the grandmother of Lady Caroline Colyear, turned slightly to the right, gazing at the spectator, seated at a table, her left arm elbow resting on table, her right arm on her lap, in a brown decollete dress with white sleeves, resting her left arm on the table. Daughter of the Restoration rake, poet and playwright Sir Charles Sedley (?1639-1701), she was the vigorously Protestant mistress of James Duke of York, though professed not to understand why: ‘I cannot be my beauty, for he must see I have none; and it cannot be my wit, for he has not enough to know that I have any.’ Her daughter and sole surviving child by him, Lady Catherine Darnley, was the ancestress of the Marquesses of Normanby. In 1696 she was married to General Sir David Colyear, 2nd Bt., who was created Earl of Portmore in 1703. By him she had two sons (see no.87): David, Viscount Milsington (1698-1729) and Charles (1700-85), who succeeded as 2nd Earl of Portmore, and was the father of Lady Caroline Colyear, wife of the 1st Lord Scarsdale. Painted the year before her creation as the Countess of Dorchester by James II, and scraped as a mezzotint by Beckett.
Provenance
Bought with part of the contents of Kedleston with the aid of the National Heritage Memorial Fund in 1987 when the house and park were given to the National Trust by Francis Curzon, 3rd Viscount Scarsdale (1924-2000)
Credit line
Kedleston Hall, The Scarsdale Collection (acquired with the help of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and transferred to The National Trust in 1987)
Marks and inscriptions
mark - painted - botton lhs of canvas - gold text - COUNTES OF DORCHESTER 1685
Makers and roles
Sir Godfrey Kneller (Lübeck 1646 - London 1723), artist