Posthumous Portrait of Mary I Stuart (1631- 1660) with a Servant

Mary Stuart died of smallpox in London on Christmas Eve 1660, at 29. She was the eldest daughter of Charles I and the first English princess to carry the title Princess Royal, married at nine to William II of Orange, the Dutch stadholder, who died of smallpox himself in 1650, eight days before their son was born. Hanneman painted this in 1664, four years after her death, for that son, the future William III, then a boy in his early teens. He had painted her from life often enough to manage without her. What he made is a masquerade picture: a white dress, a turban of ostrich feathers, and a cloak of Brazilian featherwork of the kind that reached the Dutch Republic through its colony in Brazil. A Black servant boy fastens a string of pearls at her neck while she looks past him, used here as an exotic accessory to set off her skin and her rank.