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Description: | This life-size portrait of Margaret Audley, Duchess of Norfolk 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. Margaret Audley, Duchess of Norfolk (1540-1564) was the daughter and heiress of Thomas Audley, Lord Audley of Walden (1488-1544) she first married Lord Henry Dudley and then Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1558/9), she was the mother of Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk. This painting was probably based on Vertue's engraving of about 1737 or on an eighteenth-century copy by Ranelah at Redlynch. | Subjects: | portrait (Margaret Audley Duchess of Norfolk) | 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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