Portrait of Lady Dering

Phoebus Focus XXXVII This edition of Phoebus Focus revolves around Frances Bell, the future Lady Dering, and her portrait. It’s a story of deeply human emotions – devotion to a husband imposed upon her, anxieties about children, fear of untimely death, yet also of a love of beauty, a sense of quality and a secret eye for luxury. The portrait of Frances Bell shows us what it meant to be a woman in early seventeenth-century England. And perhaps what it means to be a woman, no matter what life throws at you, or when.