Portrait of James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle

Unknown

about 1660s

Oil on canvas, Oil, Canvas

J. Paul Getty Museum

A full-length portrait depicts a man with a goatee and mustache, wearing a dark suit with puffed sleeves, a white ruffled collar, and a blue sash. He stands with one hand on his hip and the other holding a sword hilt. "[A] very fine gentleman and a most accomplished courtier, and after having spent, in a very jovial life, about 400,000£, which, upon a strict computation, he received from the crown, he left not a house or acre of land to be remembered by," wrote a friend and colleague about James Hay, first Earl of Carlisle, well-known diplomat and favorite courtier at the courts of James I and Charles I. Portraits hanging in the famous gallery collected by Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, commonly included an inscription identifying the illustrious man, like that at the lower left in this painting. Clarendon's goal was historical, not aesthe