Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

PETER LELY 83
VIII
At Hampton Court, less than anywhere else, could
men forget that it was the Reign of Beauty. Did not
Anne Hyde, the said Chancellor's daughter, herself no
great beauty but a kindly, pretty-looking lady, who
had risen, in spite of her father's perhaps not too
serious protests, to be Duchess of York, with a good
prospect of sitting on the throne, commission Peter
Lely to paint the ladies whose charms were the admiration
of the court, and whose stories, too often,
were the gossip of every scandal-monger ?
Charming pictures indeed they are, graceful, rich,
and with an evidently truthful record of the ladies'
manners, as well as their habits as they lived. Lely,
— " a mighty proud man," Pepys says, " and full of
talk," — ispar excellence a court-painter. He had
none of the sincerity of Vandyke's best work. He
had art, but no pathos; and his art was always
artificial, but it was artificial with a freshness and an
"air" which Kneller never attained. Rich though
he became, even in his own day his merits were not
always overrated. A story tells that once a critic
said, " How is it that you have so great a reputation
when you know, as well asIdo, that you are no
painter ? " " Maybe," the artist answered, " butIam
the best you have got." And it is so with the portraits
he has left us.
The best memorial of " good King Charles's golden