Pierre Lombart

Pierre Lombart
French 1613–1682

Anthony van Dyck (after)
Flemish, British 1599–1641

Lucia, Countess of Carlisle  c. 1660–63
engraving; from the ‘Countesses’ series
Colin Holden Charitable Trust

This print belongs to a collection of twelve engravings designed to be collected as a series of ‘beauties’: the suite advertised in a 1708 edition of the London Gazette as being ‘very proper to adorn rooms, closets etc’.

The Countess of Carlisle enjoyed a level of infamy in the English court, her charms and exploits immortalised in verse by numerous poets of the era. Cavalier poet John Suckling’s imagined sighting of the Countess in Upon My Lady Carlisle’s Walking in Hampton Court vividly describes dangerous impulses provoked by her beauty:

I was undoing all she wore,

And had she walked but one turn more,

Eve in her first state had not been

More naked or more plainly seen.