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English School

English School

English School, Portrait enamel of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), profile to the right, wearing gilt-studded armour and falling lawn collar

English School

Portrait enamel of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), profile to the right, wearing gilt-studded armour and falling lawn collar
Enamel
Oval, 2 ¼ in. (58 mm.) high
Philip Mould & Co.
License Image
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To view all current artworks for sale visit philipmould.com  This portrait enamel of Oliver Cromwell derives from an unfinished, ad vivum portrait miniature by Samuel Cooper (1607/8-1672) in the...
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To view all current artworks for sale visit philipmould.com

This portrait enamel of Oliver Cromwell derives from an unfinished, ad vivum portrait miniature by Samuel Cooper (1607/8-1672) in the National Portrait Gallery collection [NPG 5274] dating to c.1655. Both this and a second profile portrait of Cromwell by Cooper, previously with Philip Mould & Co., may have been produced as preparatory works for the medallist Thomas Simon (1618-1665). Cooper painted very few profile portraits of Cromwell, however, their unusual composition later became iconic images for artists, such as this English school eighteenth-century enamellist, seeking to depict the Lord Protector, both in miniatures and in engravings.

The artist Christian Richter (1678-1732) was renowned for his portraits after Cooper, including a variant of Cooper’s National Portrait Gallery profile of Cromwell sold at Christie’s, London in 1981, and paved the way for eighteenth-century engravings by Gerald Vandergucht [NPG D28725] and Thomas Cook [NPG D28727]. By the nineteenth century Oliver Cromwell was being portrayed more sympathetically by Romantic artists and poets. A memorial stone was laid in Westminster Abbey, on the site of his burial, which almost certainly revived interest in the Lord Protector with a transitioning nineteenth-century public. Engravings of Cromwell continued into the nineteenth century with artists such as J.T. Wedgwood [NPG D28729] and William Holl Sr [NPG D28724] and controversially, for the first time, statues of him were commissioned for public spaces in Manchester and outside the Palace of Westminster in London.
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Provenance

Christies, London, 21st November 1967, lot 8;
British Private Collection.
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