During their exile, the marquess entertained influential materialist thinkers Thomas Hobbes
, Pierre Gassendi
, and René Descartes
; Margaret Cavendish says she made no contribution to their learned discussions, but it seems likely that...
Leisure and Society
Ephelia
From an early age, the personal beauty of Lady Mary Villiers and her prominence at court ensured that she was painted many times: by Van Dyck
(especially), John Michael Wright
, and possibly Lely
...
Textual Features
Carola Oman
Oman relates her subject's public engagements as an infant (attending her mother's coronation, sprinkling holy water on her father's corpse); her departure from her native country, with absolutely no knowledge of the English language, to...
Textual Production
Mary Delany
MD
created work in many visual genres: drawing, painting, silhouettes, cut-paper work, shellwork, and patterns for embroidery as well as the actual embroidery itself. Her collateral descendant and biographer Ruth Hayden
remembered as a child...
Wealth and Poverty
Lady Jane Cavendish
In November 1645 she hid and thus preserved an inventory of the family silver at Welbeck, and she saved some of the tapestries and Van Dyck
paintings from both houses in the general despoiling. Out...
Timeline
By 15 July 1632: The painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck had spent...
Building item
By 15 July 1632
The painter Sir Anthony Van Dyck
had spent long enough during his second visit to England to be requesting payment for a completed portrait of Charles I
and Henrietta Maria
(known to her husband and...
18 February 1742: Horace Walpole noted at a masquerade the...
Building item
18 February 1742
Horace Walpole
noted at a masquerade the popularity of Mary Queen of Scots
costumes, and those dressed like Van Dyck portraits in vaguely seventeenth-century style.
Walpole, Horace. The Letters of Horace Walpole. Editor Toynbee, Mrs Paget, Clarendon, 1903–1925, 16 vols.