Dating from the peak of Gerard Soest’s artistic output, this exceptional rediscovered portrait joins some one hundred known works by the eminent rival to Lely, whose outstanding talent has been considerably overlooked by posterity. The sympathetic portrait is that of a girl no older than her early teenage years, and is almost certainly a member of the Wither family of Manydown Park, Hampshire. She is most likely Dorothy Wither (1661-1717), whose 1689 marriage to Lovelace Bigg (1661-1724) produced the Bigg-Wither lineage, through which the painting passed by familial descent until 2025. 

 

Wither wears a lustrous silver silk gown, composed either of one piece or a separate bodice and petticoat, and gloriously coloured folded silk drapery cascades across her front. Likely an addition of the artist’s devising, the drapery is secured to her chest with a ruby or garnet brooch set in gold, encircled by four natural pearls. A gold-mounted armband is fastened with precious stones and pearls around her upper sleeve, and a large teardrop pearl hangs from a gold hoop earring. The dazzling and schematic treatment of the silk drapery belongs to Soest’s most sophisticated and productive period, highly burnished and cut about with eccentric sweeps and sharp folds, ‘as if made of thin plates of zinc’ (Waterhouse, p. 102). Her hair is worn in an elaborately curled ‘hurluburlu’ arrangement, of a contemporary mode comparable to that of a cousin, Mary Wither of Andwell, in her portrait by Mary Beale (AGSA, 20038P59). 

 

The sophisticated composition is unusual for Soest, who often placed sitters within stone cartouches (see his portraits of the Lyttleton brothers), or set them against deeply contrasted overhanging rock faces which recede down towards the sitter ‒ but rarely employed both compositional devices in unison. As with Soest’s portrait of Lucie Herbert, Wither is set off against the dark rock face, which is gently gradated with beautiful effect around her face, as though lit by spotlight. A landscape beyond is illuminated by the glorious last light of a sunset, populated with vast trees and plumes of cloud. In fact, the particular motif of the overhanging rock face was also used regularly by John Hayls and Samuel Cooper. It was Oliver Millar who described Cooper’s sympathetic power as being most close to Soest’s approach. As was usual for Soest, the work is unsigned: only some twenty-odd works bear signatures. 

 

The present work was sold by Dorothy’s descendants alongside further portraits by Soest, including one of Dorothy’s mother-in-law, Mary Bigg, painted in c. 1674 (see Bigg-Wither, pp. 228-29). In fact, throughout the meticulous family account books of Dorothy’s brother, William Wither III (1648-1679), disbursements for pictures are only recorded in that same year. In June 1674, payments to Wither’s brother Thomas in London (presumably for overseeing payments on William’s behalf) included 10 pounds ‘[paid] by him for my mothers / [and] my picture’, and 3 pounds and 13 shillings ‘for making up of pictures’. An expense of 17 pounds and 12 shillings was made ‘for pictures’ in July. It is plausible that the present work was one such ‘picture’ ‒ painted at Dorothy’s coming of age at 13. Indeed, the Wither sisters lodged in London, making a visit to Soest’s studio a matter of relative ease.

 

GERARD SOEST (Soest 1600 - London 1681)

Born about 1600, Gerard Soest (also known as the Anglicised ‘Gilbert’) was most likely born in Soest, Westphalia, and possibly arrived in England in the mid-1640s, with his earliest dated picture being that of 1646. Soest’s early works show some influence of William Dobson, and while Lely’s authority is apparent, Soest’s works produce a more serious, ‘human’ treatment of character, unlike Lely’s rosy embellishment. The comparative realism of this approach no doubt frustrated Soest’s career, which didn’t prosper from the great patrons of court: whereas in 1667 Lely charged £15 for a head, Soest charged £3. Yet he was not without influential patronage: major commissions included those of Henry Howard, 6th Duke of Norfolk; John Hay, 2nd Marquess of Tweeddale; Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon; Aubrey de Vere, 20th Earl of Oxford; and Lady Margaret Hay, Countess of Roxburghe. His masterpiece is the outstanding full-length portrait of Cecil Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, described by Ellis Waterhouse as ‘one of the most fascinating portraits painted in England in the seventeenth century’ (Waterhouse, p. 102). His only known non-portrait, Inspiration of an Artist, belongs to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 

Following lesser commissions by minor nobility in the 1650s, Soest’s style had become fixed by the Restoration, and it was about then that John Riley was a pupil. Soest’s productivity appears unaffected into his mid-70s, and even advanced in proficiency to produce his most outstanding works. Some biographies cite Soest’s reluctance to paint women sitters during the 1660s, partly on account of his rough humour failing to please, as well as an apparent lack of due grace in the portraits themselves. George Vertue records in notebooks an incident whereby two women visited Soest in his studio to commission the artist, who, having opened the door himself, instructed them to wait ‒ at which point he exited the house and tasked his wife with imparting his refusal. However, the myriad important female portraits of the mid-1670s call into question this insistence. Having lived in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1657, Soest relocated to Tucks Court from 1658 until his death. No official records describe a wife or children, although it is possible that an Anne Soest, buried on 16th/17th July 1679, was his wife. Soest died on 11 February 1680, aged (according to Charles Beale) about eighty.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY & FURTHER READING:

 

Rev. Reginald F. Bigg-Wither, Materials for a History of the Wither Family (Winchester: Warren & Son, 1907)

B. Buckeridge, ‘An Essay Towards an English School of Painters’, in Roger de Piles, The Art of Painting, With the Lives and Characters of Above 300 of the Most Eminent Painters, 2nd ed. (London: Thomas Payne, 1744), pp. 354-430 

Jane Turner, The Dictionary of Art, Vol. 29 (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 7

Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 (Yale, C.T.: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 101-4

William Wither, Account book of William Wither [1648-1679], 102A17/E2, Hampshire Record Office