Bernard Lens’s Miniatures for the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough

Bernard Lens III,  Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment, and Their Son , 1721,  New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Using Bernard Lens III’s small-scale gouache on vellum copy after Rubens, His Wife Helena Fourment, and Their Son Frans as a point of departure (both original and copy are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), the present article examines the English tradition of small-scale copies and the particular collecting habits of the eighteenth-century owners of Rubens’s painting, John and Sarah Jenyns Churchill, first Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. The Marlboroughs, like other prominent collectors of the era, commissioned Lens to paint miniature copies after (mostly Flemish) paintings in their collection, as well as several miniature portraits of family members. The article suggests possible motivations for these commissions and for the selection of particular works for copying.

DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.1.18

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Katherine Baetjer, Adam Eaker, Catharine McCloud, Francis Russell and Kim Sloan for so generously sharing their time, expertise and collections; and of course Walter Liedtke, for being an enduring inspiration and for leaving one small stone unturned.

Imprint

Review: Peer Review (Double Blind)
DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.1.18
License:
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation:
Marjorie E. Wieseman, "Bernard Lens’s Miniatures for the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 9:1 (Winter 2017) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.1.18