This miniature depicts a young lady wearing a low-cut
dress edged with lace and embroidered with pink, gold,
green and blue flowers. Suspended from her neck is
a black silk cord, an accessory worn by fashionable
ladies in the early seventeenth century to emphasise
the fairness of their skin.[1] Her curly light brown hair
is loose, suggesting that she was unmarried at the time
this image was painted.[2] The lady’s pose and gesture –
right hand simultaneously caressing her long locks and
clasping them to her heart and left breast – surely were
intended to be erotic.

The sitter traditionally has been identified as Lady Eleanor
Touchet (1590–1652), the fifth daughter of George Touchet
(c. 1551–1617), 11th Baron Audley (later 1st
Earl of Castlehaven).[3] Assuming that to
be the case, this miniature must depict her
in her late teens, in the run-up to her disastrously unhappy
marriage, in March 1609, to the poet-courtier and lawyer
Sir John Davies (c.1560–1625). He was more than twice
her age and, according to contemporaries, ugly, illtempered, exceedingly fat and given to violent rages.[4]
Given that Davies and the Touchets were based in Ireland
at this date, presumably Oliver – who is not known to
have visited Ireland – took Lady Eleanor’s likeness on
an occasion prior to her marriage when she happened
to be in England. Nothing is known, with certainty, of
Lady Eleanor’s physical appearance. However, the poet
and politician Christopher Brooke’s description of her,
in a letter of 1622, as possessing a ‘contracted purse[d]
mouth’ is not inconsistent with the pursed lips depicted
in this miniature by Oliver.[5]


Sir John and Lady Eleanor had three children. Their
only daughter, Lucy Davies (1613–1679), who was
born in Dublin, went on to marry Ferdinando Hastings
(1609–1656), 6th Earl of Huntingdon, whose mother,
Lady Elizabeth, née Stanley, is the presumed sitter in
a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard also in the Bearsted
Collection. Lady Eleanor, who was literate in both Latin
and English and learned, too, in theology and the law,
would go on to become a prolific pamphleteer. Her first
printed pamphlet, A Warning to the Dragon and All his
Angels, was published in London in 1625; nearly seventy
more, many containing prophecies, were to follow. At
the time that Oliver painted this miniature, however,
such literary endeavours were still to come.


A virtually identical miniature – depicting the
same young lady wearing the same low-cut dress
and adopting the same erotic pose – is at Castle
Howard (fig.6).[6] The example in the Bearsted
Collection, however, must be presumed to be the
‘prime’ version. Why Oliver should have produced more
than one copy of this miniature remains unclear, though
it is tempting to speculate that Lady Eleanor might have
ordered one for her ogre of a fiancé, another for a secret
lover or admirer