Princess Mary, Daughter of Charles I

On 11 November 1647 Charles I slipped away from Hampton Court, where the army had been holding him since the summer, and left a letter for the officer who had guarded him, Colonel Edward Whalley. After thanking him, the king turned to the pictures in his rooms. Three of them were not his, he wrote, and were to go back to their owners. One was the queen in blue, another a copy of his eldest daughter's portrait, and the third "the Originall of My eldest Daughter", hanging in that chamber over the board next to the chimney, to be sent to Lady Aubigny, a widow of the royalist court. His eldest daughter was Mary, and the Museum of Fine Arts thinks this may be that original.

Van Dyck painted her around 1637, about six years old, standing at full length and dressed as a grown woman. The trail is broken after that. When the king's own collection was listed for sale in 1649, the inventory included a Princess Mary at length, sold to the painter Emanuel de Critz. Cardinal Mazarin later owned a standing Princess of Orange in blue by van Dyck, which may be this canvas too. By then her name was slipping. In 1834 the picture was sold in London as Princess Elizabeth, and the dealers who bought it in 1927 entered it in their books as Princess Henrietta Maria.