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 paintings 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. Working for the Marlboroughs and other prominent collectors of the era, Lens painted miniature copies after some of the most important paintings in their collections as well as 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.2018.10.2.3

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Review: Peer Review (Double Blind)
DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2018.10.2.3
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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 10:2 (Summer 2018) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2018.10.2.3