Portrait of a Lady in a Red Dress (possibly Lucy Walters, mother of the Duke of Monmouth, mistress of Charles II)

This portrait of a lady in a red dress, possibly Lucy Walters, connects to one of the most dramatic episodes of the Stuart exile period. Lucy Walters was Charles II's first great love, the mother of James Scott, Duke of Monmouth — the illegitimate son whose claim to the throne motivated the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 and who was executed on Tower Hill. If this is indeed Lucy Walters, it would be a posthumous portrait painted from earlier likenesses, since she died in 1658, a decade before Kneller began working in England. The possible identification preserves the ambiguities of attribution and identification that characterize many early modern portrait collections.

The vibrant red dress dominates the composition, its rich fabric rendered with Kneller's characteristic attention to the tactile quality of silk, while the sitter's features are treated with the elegant idealization typical of his female portraits.