ABSTRACT
Portraits in the seventeenth century were part of family history, preserving the likeness of an individual, and accompanying it with signs of lineage, wealth and authority. But no picture of the age aspires to function as a family chronicle and intellectual history in a way comparable to Lady Anne Clifford’s triptych at Appleby Castle. There were originally two versions of the Great Picture, one hanging in Appleby Castle, the other in Skipton Castle, both seats of Lady Anne. The Skipton version, however, decayed so badly that the wings were discarded in the nineteenth century, and the centre section was subsequently destroyed in a fire. Finally, the Great Picture itself, painted in 1646, is, in its way, a memorial to Lady Margaret thirty years after her death. Lady Anne’s feelings about her father, George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland, were ambivalent. The remaining volumes of Anne’s collection show a broad curiosity about the world, uncomplicated by religious issues.
