Baptist (‘Bab’) May (1628/9-1698), MP
John Greenhill (Salisbury c.1644 - London 1676)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1662 (bears date)
Materials
Oil on canvas (oval)
Measurements
660 x 514 mm (26 x 20 ¼ in)
Place of origin
England
Order this imageCollection
Ickworth, Suffolk
NT 851729
Summary
Oil painting on canvas (oval), Baptist (‘Bab’) May, MP (1628/9-1698) by John Greenhill (Salisbury 1649 – London 1676), inscribed above, roughly: Mr .BAPTIST..MAY...1662; later, neat inscription, mid-left: Mr BAPTIST MAY 1662. An oval head- and-shoulders portrait of a man, turned to the left, gazing at the spectator, wearing a rich brown velvet coat, and white stock; long dark brown wig. Painting inscribed on left hand side Mr Baptist May'. Baptist May (1628/9-1698), Keeper of the Privy Purse to Charles II (1665-85), and Ranger of Windsor Great Park (1671-97). He was the son of Charles I’s Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Vice-Chamberlain, Sir Humphrey May, whose daughter Isabella was the mother of the 1st Earl of Bristol, by his second wife, Judith (bap.1598-†1661), daughter of Sir William Poley (1562-1629), and, as he told Bishop Burnet, had been “bred about the King [Charles II] since he was a child”. His real celebrity - or notoriety - derives from his having been, like William Chiffinch, “indispensable to the King in his private pleasures” (DNB) or, as Pepys puts it more succinctly, “court pimp”. He also kept a fine stud. More commendable was his taste for, and collection of, pictures, one of which was Lely’s portrait of Moll Davis playing a guitar. He was successively MP for Midhurst and Thetford, but his political influence, either in Parliament or with the King, seems to have been nil. From 1665 onwards, he and the poet Abraham Cowley were in partnership with Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans, to develop St. James’s Square and the land around it – an involvement commemorated to this day by the name of Babmaes Street (formerly Mews). He was unmarried, but had at least one natural son, Charles, whom he remembered in his will – probably by Dorothy Broke, of the family of Nacton Hall, Suffolk.
Provenance
Acquired at an unknown date (but the neat version of the inscription would suggest that it was already at Ickworth in the 18th century); thence by descent, until the succession of the 4th Marquess in 1907, when catalogued as: “PASSAGES AND STAIRCASE 10. BAPTIST MAY Head and shoulders in oval frame. Baptist (b: 1628, d: 1698), son of Sir Humphrey May, by his 1st wife, Jane Uvedale; keeper of the Privy Purse to Charles II (Sir Peter Lely)”, and his death in 1951, when valued; accepted in lieu of tax by HM Treasury in 1956 and subsequently transferred to the National Trust
Credit line
Ickworth, The Bristol Collection (acquired through the National Land Fund and transferred to The National Trust in 1956)
Marks and inscriptions
'Mr. Baptist May'
Makers and roles
John Greenhill (Salisbury c.1644 - London 1676), artist
References
Farrer 1908 Edmund Farrer, Portraits in Suffolk Houses (West), 1908, no. 133 Collins Baker 1912 C. H. Collins Baker, Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters, London, 1912, Vol. I, pp. 8-9, Vol.II, 157, no.2 pp.8-9 Beckett, 1950: R.B.Beckett, ‘Baptist May’s Collection’, Connoisseur, 126, 1950, pp.32-8, reproduced as no. I. Beckett 1951 R.B. Beckett, Lely, London 1951, p.52, no.333 Davies 1979 Adriana Davies, Dictionary of British Portraiture, 1979, vol. I, 1979, p.90 Barclay 2004 Andrew Barclay, ‘May, Baptist [Bab]’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004