Anglo-Dutch School, circa 1700

Henry Rogers Broughton, 2^nd Lord Fairhaven (1900-1973);

by descent to the present owner

This extremely refined, large-scale and impressive floral garland, with its inserted portrait of an elegant lady in semi-classicising attire, poses fascinating challenges as regards both the attribution of the flower painting and the identification of the sitter.

An old label on the back of the frame states that this is a portrait of Queen Anne of England (1665-1714), by 'Von Smit' - a name that has been assumed by the maker of the label on the front of the frame to refer to Caspar Smits (1635-1688), the Dutch painter, known in Britain as 'Magdalen Smith', who worked for many years in England and Ireland, specialising in portraits, still-lifes and (as the soubriquet suggests) images of the Magdalen. This combination of artist and sitter is, however, rendered impossible by the fact that Smits died when Queen Anne was only twenty-three years old - clearly much younger than the sitter in the present work, whose resemblance to the many known portraits of the Queen is in any case somewhat generic.

All the same, both the ambition and the extremely high quality of this remarkable work do imply that it must have been made made for a patron of the highest standing, and by an artist of the first rank, most probably one of Netherlandish origin, given both the style of the flower-painting and the rather Dutch form of the stone niche that lies behind the garland.