The sitter was the daughter of Sir William Whitmore, a London merchant, and Anne Bond. She married Sir Charles Montagu (c.1564-1625), son of Sir Edward Montagu, and Elizabeth Harrington of Boughton, Northamptonshire. The marriage produced three daughters, the eldest of which, Anne, married Lord Dudley North, 4th Baron North, and to whom this portrait passed (see provenance).
The sitter’s dress, with the open ruff and gauze puffs at the inner edge, can be dated to circa 1600 and can be compared with that worn by Elizabeth Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, in Gheeraerts’s three-quarter-length portrait inscribed ‘Ano 1600’ (Private collection; see Dynasties, Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630, exhibition catalogue, London, 1995, pp. 179-180, no. 122).
We are grateful to Karen Hearn for her thoughts on the portrait.