English School, circa 1670

Anonymous sale, Newbury, Dreweatts, 14 June 2023, lot 22;

Where acquired by the present owner.

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) shares a place with Katherine Philips (1631–1664) and Margaret Cavendish (1624–1674) as one of the three best-known women writers of the seventeenth-century. Her unique status, however, is as the first woman to earn her living as a professional writer, a position which contributed to her very mixed moral reputation in her own time, possibly not aided by the ramifications of her erstwhile activities as a government spy in Holland and Surinam. Her literary output was prodigious, including at least nineteen plays, as well as quantities of fiction, poetry and translations. Her political affiliations were entirely High Tory.

This painting relates to a portrait traditionally identified as Behn at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford.¹ Although the Oxford painting was gifted to the college as recently as 1989, it was first recorded in the Duke of Buckingham's collection in 1824 identifying it as a portrait of 'Mrs. Behn, the dramatic writer'. It was later sold in the great sale at Stowe in 1848 alongside a celebrated collection of literary portraits which included the famous Chandos Portrait of Willam Shakespeare now in the National Portrait Gallery, London.² Executed on a similar scale to this small and intimate painting, the traditional authorship of the Oxford portrait to the female artist Mary Beale (1633–1699) has been discounted on stylistic grounds. Although the identification as Behn remains traditional, in light of differences found in the sitter's facial features in Sir Peter Lely's later portrait in the Yale Center for British Art, the appearance of this second version suggests the image is of some significance.³

^An old label on the reverse of the panel suggests that it was previously thought to be a portrait of Nell Gwyn (1650–1687), mistress to King Charles II and another more widely-known contemporary of Behn.

¹ For a history of the Oxford painting see C. van Hensbergen, 'Aphra Behn: Portraiture and The Biographical Account', in The Review of English Studies, New Series, vol. 72, no. 305, p. 489–92.

² Oil on canvas, 55 x 33 cm.; https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw11574/William-Shakespeare

³ Oil on canvas, 76 x 64 cm.; https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:51853