Defining Beauty in Text and Image in the late Seventeenth-Century

Upon my arrival at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the spring of 2025, the first object I examined was a small manual titled Beauties treasury by an author only identified by the initials J.W. Published in 1705, the book is a collection of beauty recipes for caring for the skin, hair, eyes, as well as for perfumes. The book opens with a printed frontispiece depicting a woman enthroned where one cherub kneels before her offering her a crown and another, floating above her, holds another crown, indicating that the woman in question is a queen. I believe that the frontispiece is meant to represent Queen Anne (r. 1702-1714) as the book was produced early in her reign. Anne is the final case study featured in my doctoral dissertation, “Bodies of the Crown: Kinship, Health, and the Construction of the Royal Body in Early Modern English Portraiture”. Aligning Anne to the contemporary expectations of female beauty at the turn of the eighteenth century is critical to my argument. Anne’s youthful beauty fades due to her age and complications from obesity and gout. As a Folger fellow, I examined seventeenth- and eighteenth-century recipe books, manuals, and treatises that focused on cultivating and maintaining female beauty, with the goal of aligning these prescriptions to female portraiture between 1660 and 1714.

British portraiture in the late seventeenth century is the era of the female beauty portrait. The women who were painted and subsequently engraved in print visually defined a portrait convention that was centered around contemporary beauty standards. The artist responsible for the beauty portrait convention was Charles II’s principal painter, Sir Peter Lely. The convention is best seen in the painter’s Windsor Beauties Series, a collection of attractive female courtiers that included royal mistresses, ladies-in-waiting, and courtiers with colorful reputations. Diarist Samuel Pepys described Lely’s beauties in 1668 as “good but not like.”¹. Pepys’ analysis indicates that while he found the portraits well-made, they were not always recognizable to the sitters’ living bodies. This statement has stuck with me as a portrait specialist. After all, most portraits, whether they are by the same artist, produced for similar patrons, or from the same era, will have shared elements and appear similar, hence the concept of a portrait convention. But Lely’s beauties have a heightened level of convention. Examining the series, Lely’s portraits visualize female beauty as requiring an oval face with a high forehead, wide, deep-set eyes, and a straight nose complimented by cherubic lips. Elegant necks are augmented by revealing décolletages and delicate hands. Skin is luminously pale, and hair is sensuously curled. These similarities are shared whether the woman is depicted as themselves, a saint, a goddess, or a shepherdess. What emerged during my fellowship research was that many printers tasked to replicate Lely’s portraits for a wider audience either had difficulty in capturing these physical features or, if not a technical issue, chose to translate Lely’s beauties differently. The possibility that engravers were unwilling to codify Lely’s version of female beauty and supplant the existing beauty standard suggests that Lely’s portraits visualized beauty differently from seventeenth century expectations.

One of the earliest Windsor Beauties is the portrait of Lady Elizabeth Hamilton, the Countess of Grammont. The portrait in the Royal Collection Trust in London and its mezzotint at the Folger demonstrate a fair translation from painting to print. However, as the series evolved over the course of the 1660s, the women depicted begin to develop Lely’s look in paintings which deviates from their printed replicas. An example of this deviation is the portrait of Charles’s mistress, Barbara Villiers, the Duchess of Cleveland, as the goddess Minerva. At first glance, Thomas Wright’s print after Lely’s painting does not seem that different. Upon closer inspection of her face, however, Wright has rendered Villiers unrecognizable. Although she wears the same classical costume and is presented in the same pose and composition, her face has been simplified: her eyes are smaller and do not take up as much of her face as they do in Lely’s painting. Her face has been rounded out and her nose is less pronounced.

Is Lely challenging the established beauty convention through his portraits? The style of the Windsor Beauties changes from Hamilton’s to Villiers’ representations. The other women represented in the series tend towards Villiers’ look rather than Hamilton’s, suggesting that Lely preferred the former’s looks over the latter’s, although Hamilton’s portrait was praised as exceptional.²

Both Hamilton’s and Villiers’ painted and printed portraits align with the contemporary beauty standard. Other manuals and recipe books at the Folger, such as Sir Hugh Plat’s Delights for ladies: to adorn their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories from 1647, explain that processes to “take away spots and freckles from the face or hands” and “how to colour a black haire presently into a chestnut colour” (p. 6) are critical to female beauty. The eyes, the most altered facial feature in the prints after Lely’s portraits, are also important to the beauty standard. In 1665’s Artificiall embellishments by Thomas Jeamson, the size of the eyes is critically assessed, “if the eyes be too little through the wasting of the whole body or any other distemper have respect to the humour which causeth it and purge that” (p. 135). Similarly, if the eyes “are too big and bear too large a proportion to other parts make an issue behind the neck, purge the head and body, drink water, and abstain as much as can be from meats that are strongly nourishing” (page 135). The manual also indicates how to care for the eyes through washing with a sponge and warm water (page 135). Although simple in its advice, these exercises are important for young ladies to maintain their beauty as the eyes are “cupid’s crystal quivers and must not be too big for that little archer nor yet so small as not to contain his magazeen of shafts,” arguing that perfectly sized eyes allow for the enticement of prospective suitors (p. 134).

Beauties treasury states: “those of you that want beauty I am sure will not be displeased to find that Art can relieve that defect and procure many of the most excellencies which acquire admiration and affection” (p. 4). The manual suggests that its collection of recipes will not only allow you to become beautiful, but to be loved. The women depicted in the Windsor Beauties Series were certainly admired and possibly loved, even by the King of England himself. The social importance of female beauty was not relegated to the physical body but was also critical to the portrait-produced body during the late seventeenth century. How this revelation influenced, and affected Queen Anne’s disabled and obese body, and her portraiture, during the early years of the eighteenth century is the next step in my research.