Bridget Holmes

Holmes was a necessary woman whose duties included emptying and scouring chamber pots and cleaning the royal apartments.

[1] She is best known as the subject of a full-length slightly over life-size portrait dated 1686 in the Royal Collection by John Riley, painted on a scale and "in a style...normally reserved for royalty" or the nobility.

[2][6] Critic Ronald Jones noted that "[Holmes] is resonant with self-respect, and can play with her venerable position in the household; teasingly she brandishes her mop after a page-boy",[7] a Page of the Backstairs according to the Royal Collection.

Riley painted two other, smaller, portraits of servants: Katherine Elliot (also Royal Collection) and A Scullion in the Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford.

[4] Other portraits by the Netherlandish painter Pieter Aertsen from the previous century show female cooks holding roasting spits like marshall's batons in what have been taken to be clear references to the conventions of elite portraiture,[8] though whether these would have been known to James (who had spent his youth in exile in the Low Countries) or Riley is unknown.