- Commissioned by the sitter (?)

- Collection Elector of Trier and prince-bishop of Worms Johann IX Philipp von Walderdorff (1701-68), Schloss Molsberg, Westerwald, possibly acquired by him in 1759 as Van Dyck (‘Alte Kopf’) for fl. 44

- Noble collection, Southern Germany

- Anonymous sale, Munich (Neumeister), 4 July 2018, no. 251, as French seventeenth century

Sir Peter Lely is mostly known for his mundane portraits of courtiers in dazzling silk draperies viewed against the backdrop of park-like settings. He succeeded the incomparable Sir Anthony van Dyck, who died in 1641, as Britain’s leading society portraitist and he took the idealization of his aristocratic sitters to the extreme, that is beyond recognition, as remarked by his contemporaries. For the present portrait of William Harvey Lely ventured into the opposite direction. He depicted the famous physician in a strikingly straightforward manner. Harvey’s face is the composition’s sole motif. And he can be easily recognized by comparing it with other portraits of Harvey.

Harvey was a man of research and discovery. Described in a period report as ‘a man of the lowest stature’, in terms of legacy he was nothing less than a giant and has long since been celebrated as the founding father of physiology.[1] A child of his time, his convictions were a curious mix of traditionalist elements, for instance his deep veneration of the classical heritage of science with its Aristotelian underpinning, and modern ideas. Harvey’s relentless focus on empirical evidence as evinced by his lifelong practice of dissection was the motor behind his greatest contribution to medical history: the discovery and description of the blood circulation in the human and animal body.  

Until then it was believed on the authority of the ancient Greeks that the cardiovascular system was comprised of two separate networks of arteries and veins. This was the, still prevalent, notion of Galen (129 – c. 200/ c. 216), who claimed that blood was produced by the liver which was then distributed to the body in centrifugal fashion. Air or pneuma was believed to be absorbed from the lungs into the pulmonary veins and carried by arteries to the various tissues scattered around the body. Arteries also transported blood from the venous side via invisible pores in the interventricular septum and peripheral anastomoses. This was an open-ended system in which blood and air simply dissipated at the ends of veins and arteries following the needs of the local tissue and so, blood did not circulate, but went up and down veins and arteries as an ebb and flow, a conviction effectively disproved by Harvey in 1628 when he published his Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Latin: An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings.), commonly known in the abbreviated De Motu Cordis. In the 72 pages of his ground-breaking work Harvey employed a combination of experiment and deductive logic to demonstrate that the arteries and veins are functionally and structurally connected in the lung and peripheral tissues, and above all that blood circulates in a closed system, pumped by the mechanical, pulsing force of the heart.

Harvey was born as the eldest of nine children in Folkstone (South-East England) where his father Thomas Harvey served as mayor. He first studied in Canterbury at the King’s School for five years, matriculating at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge in 1593 and graduating here in 1597. A period of travelling through France and Germany ensued until Harvey entered the university of Padua in 1599, where he graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1602. Upon his return to England that same year he obtained a degree as Doctor of Medicine at the university of Cambridge. Harvey was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1607 and then accepted a position at St Bartholomew’s Hospital where he was to serve for almost all the rest of his life. In August 1615 he was appointed to the office of Lumleian lecturer, a lectureship founded in 1582 by Lord Lumley and Dr. Richard Caldwell to promote the general knowledge of anatomy throughout England. A highpoint in his career occurred in 1618 when he became King James’s ‘Physician Extraordinary’. The publication of his De Motu Cordis met with resistance from other physicians but Harvey’s star nevertheless continued to rise. His reputation was firmly cemented with his appointment as the personal physician of the next king, Charles I. Before the latter’s demise in 1649, Harvey had largely retired from public life, leading a secluded life devoted to reading and studying. It was in these later years that Lely portrayed Harvey.

We are informed about Harvey’s appearance through various sources. In 1616, when Harvey was 36, a written account described him as: ‘round faced; his eyes small, round, very black and full of spirit; his hair as black as a raven and curling’.[2] Decades later, in the early 1650s, when he sat for Lely, he was a greybeard. But his gaze had lost nothing of its force. Harvey’s acute sensitivity, so uncannily captured, pervades the image, lending it a hypnotizing energy.

Countless portraits exist of Harvey, painted and in prints, spurred by his growing fame in later life and after his death. Most of them derive of only a handful of prototypes. The first attempts at a survey of Harvey’s iconography were published in 1903, 1907 and 1913.[3] A milestone was Sir Geoffrey Keynes’ book on the topic of 1948, which ran through several reeditions.[4] The most recent list was compiled in 2010 by John Ingamells, former director of the Wallace Collection, as one of a limited number of entries drafted in 2010 for the incomplete catalogue of the National Portrait Gallery in London; Early Stuart Portraits 1625-1685.[5] The earliest reliable portrait of Harvey dates of circa 1627. Attributed by Malcolm Rogers to Daniel Mijtens (c. 1590-c. 1647), it is also one of the finest of his likenesses and clearly shows the same person as in our portrait (fig. 1).

Although a number of portraits of Harvey were produced posthumously, based on older examples, there was already a clear demand for his likeness during his lifetime. The present portrait, which is a recent discovery, is a case in point. It was known that Lely painted Harvey because a copy was sold from his estate.[6] Moreover, three related extant copies have a provenance that reaches back to the seventeenth century and suggest a prototype by Lely.[7] The finest copy of the three is the one at the Royal Society (fig. 2). Lely’s original was presumed lost, but the present work appears to be that portrait.[8] It is the only extant autograph portrait of Harvey by Lely to date. Furthermore, infrared photography reveals a change in the position of Harvey’s head which was initially turned more to the left (fig. 3).[9] Such subtle changes are silent witnesses of a quest for perfection and typical for a prime version.     

Fig. 3, Infrared photo of Sir Peter Lely,

Portrait of William Harvey

Lely, who was born as Pieter van der Faes and a son of Dutch parents in Soest, Westphalia, was a pupil of Frans de Grebber in Haarlem by 1637, as records of the local Guild of Saint Luke show, by which time he was already called Lely. He settled in London in the early years of the Civil War (1639-51), initially focussing on history paintings but also satisfying the demand for portraits with aristocrats who supported the Parliament.[10] We first find him as a member of the Painter-Stainers Company in 1647. By 1654, around which time our portrait will have been painted, he was called ‘the best artist in England’. Lely accepted commissions from both camps. He had painted Charles I and after he had been wiped from the stage, made a portrait of his adversary the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell while around the same time portraying Harvey, who had watched over the health of Charles and his father James. After the Restoration in 1660, Lely was appointed Principal Painter to the new king Charles II and he was granted naturalization in 1662. In the years thereafter, Lely built up a studio that worked like a well-oiled machine, very much like the one Van Dyck had run. Lely’s working method allowed him to produce a massive number of portraits in the execution of which assistants had a considerable part. The present portrait of Harvey which hardly shows little more than the sitter’s powerful face predates Lely’s rationalized production process and will be fully autograph, without any assistance from the studio.  

Fig. 4, Anonymoys, Portrait of Johann Philipp von Walderdorff,

c. 1760, Trier, Stadtmuseum Simeonstift

The first recorded owner of Harvey’s portrait was Johann IX Philipp von Walderdorff, the elector of Trier (fig. 4). He was a the most devoted patron of the arts of his entire family and spent large sums on restoring and expanding his family castle in Molsberg (fig. 5) as well as renovating and constructing numerous other residences throughout his realm. He was especially noted for his exquisite taste for fine furniture, ordering many outstanding pieces from Abraham Roentgen (1711-93). Walderdorff also amassed a collection of paintings, although British painting did not belong to his focus.[11] Anke Held, who has extensively researched the Walderdorffsches Familienarchiv at Schloß Molsberg, kindly suggested the possibility that our painting is identical to the ‘Old head’ attributed to Anthony van Dyck, which the elector had bought in 1759 from his agent, the artist Johann Gustav Hoch (1716-79).[12]

Fig. 5, Schloss Molsberg

Notes