Portrait of Mrs. Leneve (c. 1657): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Mrs. Leneve (c. 1657) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Peter Lely (British, 1618–1680).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This woman’s heavily lidded eyes, fleshy chin, and slender fingers conform to 17th-century ideals of beauty, but when the museum acquired this painting in 1942, her features had been extensively overpainted to bring her more in line with modern standards of beauty. This later intervention included lowering the sitter’s eyebrows, reducing her prominent eyes and lips, and adding curls to make her forehead appear smaller. Mrs. Leneve now appears as the fashionable artist Peter Lely originally intended.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Mrs. Leneve
• Date: c. 1657
• Creator attribution: Peter Lely (British, 1618–1680)
• Culture: England, 17th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 157.5 x 132.5 x 13 cm (62 x 52 3/16 x 5 1/8 in.); Unframed: 126.7 x 101.3 cm (49 7/8 x 39 7/8 in.)
• Collection: P - British before 1800
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1942.247

A detail from the museum

Long, slender fingers signified aristocratic elegance when this portrait was painted.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. Otto Miller

Further reading listed by the museum

• Snodin, Michael, ed. Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. p. 309, cat. 140.
• Merchant Taylors' Company (London, England), and Frederick Morris Fry. A Historical Catalogue of the Pictures, Herse-Cloths & Tapestry at Merchant Taylors' Hall With a List of the Sculptures & Engravings. London, United Kingdom: Chapman and Hall, 1907.
• Francis, Henry S. "The Portrait of Sarah Earle by Sir Peter Lely." The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of Art XXXI, no. 10 (December, 1944): 177-180.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.