Fate of Van Dyck's mistress revealed at last
February 7 2018
Pictures: BG and Fondation Custodia (below)
In this month's Burlington Magazine you can read an extraordinary piece of scholarly sleuthing, on the life of Margaret Lemon, best known as Van Dyck's mistress. Until now, little has been known of her life, and nothing of her fate after Van Dyck's death. But the historian Hilary Maddicott has discovered not only that she committed suicide in 1642 (in Oxford, after the death in battle of one her lovers), but that she was well known for cross-dressing. This now explains the curious miniature of her by Samuel Cooper, below.
The other piece of good news is that the Burlington Magazine has decided to make Hilary's article free to download for a week, here. Well worth a click! (Also, if enough of us click, it might persuade the Burlington to do this more often.)
