Jane, née Belchier, Wife of Richard Huddleston

Jane Belchier was a member of the English Catholic gentry, and her marriage to Richard Huddleston connected her to the Huddleston family of Sawston Hall in Cambridgeshire, who had sheltered the fugitive Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Nattier's 1766 portrait—one of his very last works before his death later that year—depicts her with a directness appropriate to the English portrait tradition while maintaining the refined Rococo handling of his French manner. The work is held by St Edmund's College in Cambridge, itself a Catholic institution with deep roots in English recusant culture. English Catholics visiting Paris were not uncommon in this period, when French culture represented the apex of European refinement and Paris offered escape from the social disabilities of Catholic life in Protestant England. This late Nattier portrait combines English social substance with French pictorial elegance.

As one of Nattier's final paintings, this work rewards close examination for evidence of his late manner—whether his technique remained fully assured or shows the slight loosening common in very elderly painters. The face is likely his most carefully worked passage.