Rachel de Ruvigny, Countess of Southampton, as Fortune

Dyck, Anthony van, after · 1758

Mezzotint portrait on paper of Rachel de Massue de Ruvigny (1603-1640), Countess of Southampton, as Fortune, engraved and published by James McArdell (1729-1765) in London in 1758; proof before lettering. It is a copy of a painting by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) then in the Collection of Jemima Yorke (1723-1797), Marchioness Grey and Countess of Hardwicke, and now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. It was the marchioness that commissioned McArdell to create the mezzotint copy in 1758. Van Dyck produced another version of the painting which included the countess holding a sceptre and this is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. A third painting of the same subject (without sceptre) hangs at Welbeck Abbey. An enamel version, produced three years after the countess’s death by Jean Petitot, is now in the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth. The countess is seated in the heavens, her arm resting on a clear glass orb with a skull visible underneath the hem of her satin gown. The orb symbolises the fragility of mortal happiness broken by death, the skull a memento mori.