Help with identifying painting

Hi James, Gosh, a regular 'whodunnit' and while not exactly a blank canvas with no signature or labels there isn't much to go on is there? What DO you know about this painting ie, where did it come from? did they have others in their collection and do you know a favourite dealer they might have used? have you had it seen by anyone eg a dealer, auction house or have you spoken to anyone from an art museum to see if they have any ideas? Good luck in your search and let us know if you have any success.

Wow! Quite a challenge, but if it's that old, will be well worth sourcing. Good luck

It's an oil painting, on stretched canvas, of a lady in what I should have said was early 18th century costume, if you hadn't told us it had been in the family for 350 years, which takes us to the 17th. It appears to be in good condition. There's an outside possibility that the original work was larger, ie that it's been cut down at some stage; if so, that might explain where the signature went, although it would have been a bad idea to do that.... if anyone did, though, they've done a good job of re-stretching it and fitting it to the frame. As to its genre - well, I don't know that it really fits into one. There were portrait painters who specialized in recording the features of ladies and gentlemen of wealth, and this looks like one of them. If it really is 350 years old, that's 1666 - 6 years after the restoration of King Charles II to the English throne, same year as the Great Fire of London. So a seriously elderly painting. What really surprises me about it is that it seems to be so clean - I'd have expected a painting of this vintage to have acquired some very dirty varnish over the last 300 years, and I can see no sign of that even when enlarging the picture - pity it's on its side by the way. I presume that patch of light is the glare from your camera - not a feature of the painting. The advice offered above is good, especially the bit about tracing your own family's history. I don't recognize the subject at all, but from what I can see she's been very well painted - to be quite honest, if you didn't seem convinced that it's the age claimed for it, I'd assume it was a later copy. You might like to try the Antiques Roadshow with this - valuing it is difficult: if it's a real old portrait, the value should be in the mid to high hundreds, but of course if a name could be put to the subject, or the artist, or better still both, we could take a big step up from there. Well worth further research.