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Description: | This life-size portrait of Thomas Audley, Lord Audley of Walden (1488-1544) by the Italian painter Biagio Rebecca (1734/5-1808) belongs to a series of thirteen ancestral portraits commissioned by Sir John Griffin Griffin, 4th Lord Howard de Walden, 1st Lord Braybrooke for the ornamentation of the Saloon at Audley End in Essex. This room the first in a suite of five, newly arranged by Sir John Griffin Griffin is most richly decorated, as an observer of 1819 wrote: 'The frieze, cornice, pilasters and other parts, are richly carved and gilt; and the chimney-piece contains some beautiful miniature paintings, with the arms of the Howard family'. The interior architecture of this room gracefully integrates the rooms original Elizabethan 'stuccoed ceiling ornamented with pendantives' and frieze with an eighteenth-century neoclassical panelled interior suggestive of an arcade, each arch of which incorporates a portrait of 'the distinguished personages connected with the history of the place' (Wright's History of Essex, 1836). An extensive inscription records the genesis and development of the house. Thomas Audley, Lord Audley of Walden (1488-1544) was Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII and founder of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He married Lady Elizabeth Grey, daughter of Thomas Grey, 2nd Marquess of Dorset. This portrait is based on another in the Audley End collection attributed to a follower of Adriaen Thomas Key dated 1569 | Subjects: | portrait (Thomas Audley Lord Audley of Walden) | Source: | Vads | Creator: | Artist: Rebecca, Biagio (Italian painter, 1735-1808, active in Great Britain) Æ | Identifier: | http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=8737... | Go to resource |
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