No one knows what Hester Pulter looked like; no visual representation of her person seems to have survived. Of her appearance, we know no more than such glimpses as she appears to present in poems such as Made When I Was Not Well51, where she contrasts her now dimmed, dull, saddened eyes with their former sprightliness in youth; her thin, lank, silver hair with her erstwhile golden-brown curls; and her now-withered with once-swelling breasts. This self-deprecating and seemingly forthright blazon goes some way toward letting us picture Pulter in her middle years—though we should remain alert to the possibility that it might instead deceive us altogether, even as to the identity of its speaker, which of course might not be the poet at all. Just as a poem in the first-person might or might not be autobiographical, this poem might or might not provide a reliable picture of Pulter’s body, even as it offers up her chosen portrayal of a possible self.

When treated with an appropriate mix of imagination and caution, what can complement this fragmentary and uncertain verbal version of a self-portrait are some depictions of and by her contemporaries, including visual representations of family members and others who shared her social status. Of course, all images, whether verbal or visual, are stylizations that offer only proxies for and approximations of the objects represented, rather than the objects themselves. This Exploration offers a brief visual tour of some such depictions, in various media, including some that might even have been made by Pulter. Still other visions of her might yet turn up in an attic or at auction, as Pulter’s manuscript did after centuries of similar invisibility.

Cornelius Johnson van Ceulen, The Capel Family, oil on canvas, circa 1640, 63 in. x 102 in. (1600 mm x 2591 mm), purchased with help from the Art Fund, 1970, Primary Collection, NPG 4759, National Portrait Gallery, London. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

The portrait above depicts a family to which Pulter was related by marriage. Her husband, Arthur Pulter, was first cousin to Arthur Capel, the adult male depicted here. Capel was born in 1604, a year before Hester Pulter. She addresses him as “noble Capel” and “heroic kinsman” in Let None Sigh More for Lucas or for Lisle [On the Same (2)]15, where she laments his death, which took place by beheading after he, a Royalist officer in the civil wars, briefly escaped from prison. The Capels, when painted, were extremely rich thanks to an inheritance of extensive estates in 1632. This portrait thus depicts a family related to Pulter, and of similar social status, but of considerably greater wealth. The setting for this portrait is the Capel family home at Hadham Hall, in Little Hadham, Hertfordshire—or, rather, that home’s Italianate garden, a costly addition commissioned by Arthur Capel. Hadham Hall lay about a dozen miles from where Pulter lived her married life at Broadfield; while the Capels are depicted visually in relation to the garden, Pulter depicts herself verbally in relation to the garden at Broadfield estate (see, for instance, The Garden12 and The Snail, the Tulip, and the Bee [Emblem 53]118).

While we may not have a visual portrait of Hester Pulter, either alone or en famille, we do have several such representations of her father, most of which designate and celebrate whichever public office or offices he occupied at the time. These depictions include the following painting, made after he was elevated from the office of Lord High Treasurer in the court of James I to the rank of earl:

Unknown artist, James Ley, 1st Earl of Marlborough, oil on panel, after 1624, 23 in. x 19 in. (584 mm x 483 mm), purchased, 1900, Primary Collection, NPG 1258, National Portrait Gallery, London. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

The intricate lace ruff and cap, as well as the miniature portrait of James I and the wand associated with his position as the royal treasurer, all convey qualities of dignity and authority which may or may not have been warranted by the sitter’s character in public office or private life. (For more details on this and other portraits from the period, see Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits [Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969], esp. pp. 206–7).

In contrast, of Pulter’s mother, born Mary Petty, the only known likeness is the effigy on her tomb in the church at Westbury, the village in Wiltshire where Pulter likely spent some part of her childhood after her family returned from Ireland.

Leah Knight, photograph of detail of tomb of Mary and James Ley, All Saints, Westbury, Wiltshire, UK.

Pulter’s parents are entombed side by side at Westbury, even though her father remarried twice after the death of his first wife.

Leah Knight, photograph of detail of tomb of Mary and James Ley, All Saints, Westbury, Wiltshire, UK.

Just as we possess no likeness of Pulter, none apparently survive of her fifteen children. John Milton, in a sonnet about Pulter’s father addressed to Pulter’s sister, Margaret, persuaded himself that “by you, Madam, me thinks I see him living yet” (lines 10–11); we are not similarly privileged to conjure up a vision of Pulter by consulting the appearance of her offspring.

We have reason to suspect, however, that Pulter lived with a scaldingly intense mental portrait of her daughter, Jane, who died at the age of twenty. Two years after her death, Pulter writes movingly of her “milky limbs” and “snowy skin” (lines 11, 34), as well as of one symptom of what killed her—“the spots upon her fair skin … / Like drops of blood upon unsullied snow”—in Upon the Death of my Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane Pulter10, lines 51–2). Jane’s brown curls, black eyes, and snowy skin are similarly, if reluctantly, memorialized in Tell Me No More [On the Same]11. Of course, Pulter’s memory, like her writing, might well have been shaped by the poetic tradition of the blazon, among others, in which these poems participate—a possibility that need not subtract from the authenticity or artistry of her word-painting as a memorial of a vanished beloved body.

While we are not aware of any visual representations of Pulter’s children, might one or more of her daughters likenesses survive, if not in a painting, in a piece of embroidery like this one?

Unknown artist, embroidered picture showing three young ladies in oval frames, silk, embroidered with coloured silks and metal threads, England, 1650–99, 32cm x 22cm, museum number T.382–1913, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

We know nothing of the maker of this piece—nor, indeed, of the maker’s gender, or even (I would argue) the gender of the figures portrayed (which is nonetheless inferred in the museum’s description, quoted in the attribution statement above). However, in this period and place, women were often expected to create such intricate needlework artifacts. Susan Frye has argued that textiles like this were “once ubiquitous media ... to which women were valued contributors and through which women simultaneously asserted and explored their identities.”1 If Frye is right, then such visual evidence should be considered alongside easel paintings and other media when we try to imagine how women understood and crafted their embodied appearance in the world.

It is also possible that Pulter stitched her own self-portrait. If so, the incomplete visage on the central figure of the embroidered sampler, below, seems an apt emblem of Pulter’s relationship to the act of revealing her person. In this sampler, the sole human figure, missing a facial outline, is distinguished from the fully-finished depictions of the other creatures (so like those which populatePulter’s emblematic verse).

Unknown artist, detail from unknown artist, border, embroidered linen with floral sprigs, England, 1630–99, wool embroidery on linen and cotton, given by Miss E. R. Price, museum number T.115–1930, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Out of an understandable kind of curiosity, we often crave a glimpse of authors’ faces; but we might find that we see more, as this sampler emblematically suggests, when we keep a steady eye on the depictions that artists like Pulter create instead.

Footnotes