Elisabeth Pepys
by James Thomson, after John Hayls (1666)
1828
National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG D5507
Thomson's engraving is from the painting by John Hayls that Samuel Pepys commissioned in February 1666. The posture, with the palm of martyrdom and wheel of torture, was designed to show Elisabeth as St. Catherine. The painting was destroyed around 1830 by a Scottish nurse who, “offended by the somewhat décolleté manner she was painted, cut the canvas up into strips” (W.H. Whitear, More Pepysiana, 1927, p ii).
This image is provided courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London, under Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). The NPG claims copyright to this image. In other jurisdictions it is considered to be in the public domain.