Anne Kirke

This painting commemorates the appointment of Anne Kirke to the position of the Queen’s dresser. It is no surprise that the sitter wears the latest fashions: pearl jewelry and a jewel-adorned amber dress. Its sleeves reveal her lower arms, a provocative sight in this period. The eff ect of grandeur and monumentality that van Dyck gives sitters, seen in the portrait’s full-length format and lavish costume, was widely influential on 18th-century British portrait painters that followed.

Only four years aft er this portrait was painted, Kirke drowned in a tragic barge crash near London Bridge. The Huntington Library holds several publications that commemorate Kirke, including a poem by her niece, the artist and poet Anne Killigrew, published after Killigrew’s untimely death at age twenty-five in 1685.