The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

52 Lucy Harington
Major Acquisitions
(1581-1627)
Portrait Medal of Lucy Harington,
Countess of Bedford by Nicholas
Briot (c.1579-c.1646)
1625
silver, cast and chased,
5.3 x 4.2 cm
CM.2111.2003
Purchased from the Cunliffe
Fund, with a grant from the
National Art Collections Fund.
Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford
(1581–1627) was one of the most
interesting and vivacious women in
court circles in the early 17th century.
She was a companion of James I's
Queen, Anne of Denmark, and his
daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia, and a
patroness of the poets John Donne and
Ben Jonson, and the architect Inigo
Jones. A portrait at Woburn Abbey shows
her in a masque costume designed for
her by Inigo Jones, with a plume of
heron feathers similar to that shown on
the medal. She was a collector of art and
ancient coins, and this medal is one of
the first in England to be commissioned
by a private citizen. It is known only
from this one piece, which may well
have been the specimen produced for
the collection of the sitter herself.
The medal is the work of Nicholas Briot
a celebrated French coin engraver,
medallist and inventor of minting
machinery. He held the post of
engraver-general at the Paris mint from
1606 to 1625, but in the Summer of
1625 he moved to England, where he
became the principal die-engraver at the
Royal Mint. This silver medal, produced
shortly after Briot's arrival in England, is
work of a superb quality of which only
he was capable at this period.