The portraiture of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) spans the evolution of English royal portraits in the early modern period (1400/1500–1800), from the earliest representations of simple likenesses to the later complex imagery used to convey the power and aspirations of the state, as well as of the monarch at its head.
Even the earliest portraits of Elizabeth I contain symbolic objects such as roses and prayer books that would have carried meaning to viewers of her day. Later portraits of Elizabeth layer the iconography of empire—globes, crowns, swords and columns—and representations of virginity and purity, such as moons and pearls, with classical allusions, to present a complex "story" that conveyed to Elizabethan era viewers the majesty and significance of the 'Virgin Queen'.
Overview
Portraiture in Tudor England
Two portraiture traditions had arisen in the Tudor court since the days of Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII. The portrait miniature developed from the illuminated manuscript tradition. These small personal images were almost invariably painted from life over the space of a few days in watercolours on vellum, stiffened by being glued to a playing card. Panel paintings in oils on prepared wood surfaces were based on preparatory drawings and were usually executed at life size, as were oil paintings on canvas.
Unlike her contemporaries in France, Elizabeth never granted rights to produce her portrait to a single artist, although Nicholas Hilliard was appointed her official limner, or miniaturist and goldsmith. George Gower, a fashionable court portraitist created Serjeant Painter in 1581, was responsible for approving all portraits of the Queen created by other artists from 1581 until his death in 1596.Strong 1987, pp. 14–15
Elizabeth sat for a number of artists over the years, including Hilliard, Cornelis Ketel, Federico Zuccari, Isaac Oliver, and most likely to Gower and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. Portraits were commissioned by the government as gifts to foreign monarchs and to show to prospective suitors. Courtiers commissioned heavily symbolic paintings to demonstrate their devotion to the Queen, and the fashionable long galleries of later Elizabethan country houses were filled with sets of portraits. The studios of Tudor artists produced images of Elizabeth working from approved "face patterns", or approved drawings of the Queen, to meet this growing demand for her image, an important symbol of loyalty and reverence for the crown in times of turbulence.
European context
By far the most impressive models of portraiture available to English portraitists were the many portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger, the outstanding Northern portraitist of the first half of the 16th century, who had made two lengthy visits to England, and had been Henry VIII's court artist. Holbein had accustomed the English court to the full-length life-size portrait,Waterhouse (1978), pp. 25–6. although none of his originals now survive. His great dynastic mural at Whitehall Palace, destroyed by fire in 1698, and perhaps other original large portraits, would have been familiar to Elizabethan artists.
Both Holbein and his great Italian contemporary Titian had combined great psychological penetration with a sufficiently majestic impression to satisfy their royal patrons. By his second visit, Holbein had already begun to move away from a strictly realist depiction; in his Jane Seymour, "the figure is no longer seen as displacing with its bulk a recognizable section of space: it approaches rather to a flat pattern, made alive by a bounding and vital outline".Waterhouse:19 This tendency was to be taken much further by the later portraits of Elizabeth, where "Likeness of feature and an interest in form and volume have gradually been abandoned in favour of an effect of splendid majesty obtained by decorative pattern, and the forms have been flattened accordingly".Waterhouse, p. 36
Titian continued to paint royal portraits, especially of Philip II of Spain, until the 1570s, but in sharply reduced numbers after about 1555, and he refused to travel from Venice to do them.Fletcher, Jennifer in: David Jaffé (ed), Titian, pp. 31–2, The National Gallery Company/Yale, London 2003, The full-length portrait of Philip (1550–51) now in the Prado was sent to Elizabeth's elder sister and predecessor Mary I in advance of their marriage.
Towards the mid-16th century, the most influential Continental courts came to prefer less revealing and intimate works,For analysis of this trend see Levey (1971), Ch. 3, and Trevor-Roper (1976) Ch. 1 and 2. and at the mid-century the two most prominent and influential royal portraitists in paint, other than Titian, were the Netherlandish Anthonis Mor and Agnolo Bronzino in Florence, besides whom the Habsburg court sculptor and medallist Leone Leoni was similarly skilled. Mor, who had risen rapidly to prominence in 1540s, worked across Europe for the Habsburgs in a tighter and more rigid version of Titian's compositional manner, drawing also on the North Italian style of Moretto da Brescia.Waterhouse (1978), pp. 27–8. For his relationship with the Habsburgs, see Trevor-Roper (1976) passim, who also covers those of Leone Leoni and Titian in detail. Mor had actually visited London in 1554, and painted three versions of his well-known portrait of Queen Mary; he also painted English courtiers who visited Antwerp.Waterhouse (1978), p. 28.
Mor's Spanish pupil Alonso Sánchez Coello continued in a stiffer version of his master's style, replacing him as Spanish court painter in 1561. Sofonisba Anguissola had painted in an intimately informal style, but after her recruitment to the Spanish court as the Queen's painter in 1560 was able to adapt her style to the much more formal demands of state portraiture. Moretto's pupil Giovanni Battista Moroni was Mor's contemporary and formed his mature style in the 1550s, but few of his spirited portraits were of royalty, or yet to be seen outside Italy.
Bronzino developed a style of coldly distant magnificence, based on the Mannerist portraits of Pontormo, working almost entirely for Cosimo I, the first Medici grand duke. Bronzino's works, including his striking portraits of Cosimo's Duchess, Eleanor of Toledo, were distributed in many versions across Europe, continuing to be made for two decades from the same studio pattern; a new portrait painted in her last years, about 1560, exists in only a few repetitions. At the least many of the foreign painters in London are likely to have seen versions of the earlier type, and there may well have been one in the Royal Collection.
French portraiture remained dominated by small but finely drawn bust-length or half-length works, including many drawings, often with colour, by François Clouet following, with a host of imitators, his father Jean, or even smaller oils by the Netherlandish Corneille de Lyon and his followers, typically no taller than a paperback book. A few full-length portraits of royalty were produced, dependent on German or Italian models.Blunt, pp. 62–64
Creating the royal image
William Gaunt contrasts the simplicity of the 1546 portrait of Lady Elizabeth Tudor with later images of her as queen. He wrote, "The painter...is unknown, but in a competently Flemish style he depicts the daughter of Anne Boleyn as quiet and studious-looking, ornament in her attire as secondary to the plainness of line that emphasizes her youth. Great is the contrast with the awesome fantasy of the later portraits: the pallid, mask-like features, the extravagance of headdress and ruff, the padded ornateness that seemed to exclude all humanity."Gaunt, 37.
The lack of emphasis given to depicting depth and volume in her later portraits may have been influenced by the Queen's own views. In the Art of Limming, Hilliard cautioned against all but the minimal use of chiaroscuro modelling seen in his works, reflecting the views of his patron: "seeing that best to show oneself needeth no shadow of place but rather the open light...Her Majesty..chose her place to sit for that purpose in the open alley of a goodly garden, where no tree was near, nor any shadow at all..."Quotation from Hilliard's Art of Limming, c. 1600, in Nicholas Hilliard, Roy Strong, 1975, p.24, Michael Joseph Ltd, London,
From the 1570s, the government sought to manipulate the image of the Queen as an object of devotion and veneration. Sir Roy Strong writes: "The cult of Gloriana was skilfully created to buttress public order and, even more, deliberately to replace the pre-Reformation externals of religion, the cult of the Virgin and saints with their attendant images, processions, ceremonies and secular rejoicing."Strong 1977, p. 16 The pageantry of the Accession Day tilts, the poetry of the court, and the most iconic of Elizabeth's portraits all reflected this effort. The management of the Queen's image reached its heights in the last decade of her reign, when realistic images of the aging Queen were replaced with an eternally youthful vision, defying the reality of the passage of time.
Early portraits
The young queen Portraits of the young Queen, many of them likely painted to be shown to prospective suitors and foreign heads of state, show a naturality and restraint similar to that of the portrait of the young Lady Elizabeth.
The full-length Hampden image of Elizabeth in a red satin gown, originally attributed to Steven van der Meulen and reattributed to George Gower in 2020, has been identified by Sir Roy Strong as an important early portrait, "undertaken at a time when her image was being tightly controlled", and produced "in response to a crisis over the production of the royal image, one which was reflected in the words of a draft proclamation dated 1563". The draft proclamation (never published) was a response to the circulation of poorly made portraits in which Elizabeth was shown "in blacke with a hoode and cornet", a style she no longer wore.Strong 1987, p. 23 Symbolism in these pictures is in keeping with earlier Tudor portraiture; in some, Elizabeth holds a book (possibly a prayer book) suggesting studiousness or piety. In other paintings, she holds or wears a red rose, symbol of the Tudor Dynasty's descent from the House of Lancaster, or white roses, symbols of the House of York and of maidenly chastity.Doran 2003b, p. 177 In the Hampden portrait, Elizabeth wears a red rose on her shoulder and holds a gillyflower in her hand. Of this image, Strong says "Here Elizabeth is caught in that short-lived period before what was a recognisable human became transmuted into a goddess".
One artist active in Elizabeth's early court was the Flemish miniaturist Levina Teerlinc, who had served as a painter and gentlewoman to Mary I and stayed on as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber to Elizabeth. Teerlinc is best known for her pivotal position in the rise of the portrait miniature. There is documentation that she created numerous portraits of Elizabeth I, both individual portraits and portraits of the sovereign with important court figures, but only a few of these have survived and been identified.Strong 1987, pp. 55–57
Elizabeth and the goddesses