Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), bust-length, in an embroidered red dress with white chemisette and embroidered ruff, with a jewelled chain and headdress

Queen Elizabeth I has one of the richest and most extensive iconographies of any British monarch (see R. Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, London, 2003). She was acutely aware of the propaganda power of her portraits and understood the importance of exercising control over her image. This fresh and beautifully-preserved portrait of the queen, which has been in the collection at Fonthill House since the late-nineteenth century, is one of the earliest likenesses from her reign, showing her as a confident young woman at the age of about thirty-four. Recent technical examination at the Yale Center for British Art, and a thorough reassessment by Edward Town and Jessica David, has identified this portrait as one of the first, possibly the prime, of a new portrait type that was created following a draft proclamation of 1563. This called for a new and improved image of the young queen, which may not have been produced until the recommencement of marriage negotiations with Charles II, Archduke of Austria, brother of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II in the mid-1560s. The Fonthill bust-length may in fact have been the portrait taken to Vienna in 1567 to aid these negotiations (E. Town and J. David, op. cit., pp. 731-47). On the basis of close stylistic affinities with his documented portraits, Town and David have attributed the work to George Gower, the most successful artist working in oils at the court of Elizabeth I and one of the chief architects of her iconography, adding significantly to our understanding of Gower’s early oeuvre and formative years in London (loc. cit.).

The earliest portrait type to emerge during Queen Elizabeth’s reign was a somewhat mechanical image that showed her standing rigidly facing the spectator in black, with an ermine-lined collar to her surcoat (c. 1558, known as ‘The Northwick Park’ Pattern, after the portrait formerly at Northwick Park and now London, National Portrait Gallery, inv. no. NPG4449; fig. 1). The inferior quality of these very early portraits of the young queen likely prompted the draft proclamation of 1563, which sought to forbid painters, printers and engravers from producing debased images of the queen until she had sat for an artist to establish an authentic pattern to be copied: ‘some speciall conning payntor might be permitted by access to hir Maty to take ye naturall representation of hir Matie wherof she hath bene allweise of hir owne [?riall] disposition very unwillyng’ (P.R.O., S.P. 12/31, no. 25, cited in R. Strong, op. cit., 1963, p. 5). This special painter ‘shall have first finished a portraicture therof, after which fynished, hir Majesty will be content that all other payntors, or grauors…shall and maye at ther plesures follow the sayd pation [i.e. pattern] of first portraicture’ (loc. cit.). As Karen Hearn expounded, the monarch’s public image was ‘devised, fixed and then disseminated, by a number of artists working in different media, from one original design – like the establishment of a present-day corporate logo’ (Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630, exhibition catalogue, London, 1995, p. 77).

In his pioneering survey of the queen's iconography, Sir Roy Strong suggested that the second, altogether more sophisticated portrait type to appear during Elizabeth’s reign, to which the present portrait belongs, probably transpired from this 1563 proclamation (op. cit., 1963, p. 57). The resulting portrait was clearly popular and was reproduced in bust-length, three-quarter-length and full-length formats, with variations in background and costume details (ibid., pp. 57-8, nos. 12-22). Strong dubbed this new image of the queen The ‘Barrington Park’ Pattern after, in his opinion, the best and most important surviving version – a three-quarter-length in a private collection (op. cit., 2003, p. 59, fig. 47, 'Attributed to Steven van der Meulen'). The recent technical examination of the Fonthill portrait has highlighted the quality of its conception and execution, revealing its relationship to other variants and indicating it to be one of the earliest, possibly the prime of this type. Dendrochronological examination of its single Baltic oak panel indicates that it was felled between circa 1559 and 1589 (report by Ian Tyers, May 2024, available upon request).

Elizabeth’s features, headdress, costume and jewels are all here rendered with the utmost skill and craftsmanship. Infrared imaging has revealed carbon underdrawing around the sitter’s eyes, nose and ear that is nevertheless too faint to judge whether it was drawn freehand or from a pattern. While there is no visible underdrawing beneath the costume, it is likely that guidelines were made, which were subsequently obscured in the painting process. Strokes of dark brown paint delineate Elizabeth’s silhouette and the small puffs of fabric on her costume. A similar paint mixture was applied around her facial features, reinforcing its contours beneath the upper modelling layers (N.B. an extract from the technical examination carried out by the Conservation Department at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, is available upon request). Technical analysis of a full-length version of this portrait type known as the Hampden portrait, formerly in the collection of the Earl of Buckinghamshire at Little Hampden Lodge (fig. 3; private collection; R. Strong, op. cit., 1963, p. 57, no. 15), shows it to have been prepared with fine, transferred underdrawing. The delineation of the face is mechanical, consistent with a tracing made from a template, while the lines of the hands are softer. While the proportions, costume and palette bear an obvious relationship to the Fonthill portrait, the template-based underdrawing of the Hampden portrait includes details – such as the veins on the temple and forehead, hatched strands at the hairline and folds of the ear – that are in the paint layer, and not the drawn underlayer, of the Fonthill Elizabeth. Some of these similarities are obscured by upper paint layers in the Hampden portrait and only slightly visible to the naked eye (with the drawing in the queen’s hair evident only in infrared imaging). This suggests that the pattern used for the head of the queen in the Hampden portrait was derived from an earlier source – presumably the Fonthill portrait – and was augmented during the painting process. There are also significant affinities between the Fonthill portrait and a picture of Elizabeth I in the Berger Collection at the Denver Art Museum: although the costume, ruff and background are of a different design, the silhouettes of the two pictures are nearly identical and the bejewelled pendant closely comparable. Technical examination of the three-quarter-length in a private collection that Strong has attributed to Steven van der Meulen has not been undertaken, so it has not been possible to establish its precise relationship with the other versions of the type.

In his second survey of the queen’s portraits (published in 1987 and 2003), Strong proposed that the recommencement of negotiations with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II for a match between Elizabeth I and his brother Charles II, Archduke of Austria, may have been the actual trigger for the production of the new likeness, following the 1563 proclamation (op. cit., 2003, p. 59). Indeed, Thomas Radcliffe, 3^rd Earl of Sussex was dispatched to Vienna to resume marriage negotiations in 1567 and correspondence between the Earl of Sussex and the queen in July that year makes clear that the Earl had in his possession a new portrait likeness of Elizabeth, which the Governor of the Netherlands, Margaret of Parma, was determined to see. The portrait is reported to have captivated the aristocrats in attendance, as they testified to the quality of the picture and exclaimed that it was so lifelike that it lacked only breath:

‘she desired me if I had yor picture that she might see it for that I shold do her a great pleasure to showe her the picture of her whose persone she honoured and loved so much … w[ch] she sawe w[th] the Duchess of Askott and the countesse of Mansfelde and certain other lords and Ladyes, in whose presens mons[r] de Maldingham affirmed it to be so like unto yo[u] as ther lacked but speche’ (T.N.A., S.P. 70/92, fol. 18, cited in E. Town and J. David, op. cit., p. 745).

It is notable that the Fonthill portrait was acquired from a ‘Prince Esterházy’ – either Nikolaus III (1817-1894) or Pal Antal Miklós (1843-1898) – by Alfred Morrison in around 1890. The Esterházy princes had served the Holy Roman Emperor since the sixteenth century and had governed a region of what is now western Slovakia, about a day’s ride from Vienna. Town and David make the logical deduction that the Fonthill bust-length may have been the portrait taken by Sussex to Vienna that then entered the Esterházy collection after marriage negotiations with Charles II collapsed (op. cit., p. 745). Its portable scale would further support this hypothesis.

Turning to the issue of authorship, the Fonthill portrait had been historically attributed to both Lucas de Heere (c. 1534-1584) and the school of Marcus Gheeraerts (1561-1635). However, recent technical examination has revealed strong stylistic affinities with documented works by George Gower, namely his portraits of Sir Thomas Kytson and his wife Elizabeth Cornwallis, Lady Kytson, of 1573 (both London, Tate Britain), and his striking Self-Portrait of 1579 (fig. 4; private collection). Town and David identified certain signature traits in these firmly attributed works that are also evident in the Fonthill painting, notably Gower’s tendency to apply the paint using two distinct systems: laying down thick, pre-mixed strokes, which were either blended wet-in-wet with a sable brush to a seamless porcelain finish, principally for the flesh tones, or left to stand proud of the paint surface in ‘braille-like patterns’ that imitated the properties of lace, hair and embroidery (op. cit., p. 734). The same characteristics can be observed in the Hampden portrait, which Town and David also attribute to Gower. This approach differs notably from Gower’s contemporaries, such as Cornelis Ketel, who used paint in a less direct way, especially in the flesh, where underlayers, such as grey priming and brown underpaint, are left partially visible through upper scumbles and glazes to help define bone structure through transparent flesh (loc. cit.).

The inclusion of both the Fonthill and the Hampden portrait in Gower’s oeuvre add significantly to our understanding of the artist’s work and how he became established in London in the 1560s, which had been overlooked prior to Town and David’s 2020 Burlington article. Building on the work of J.W. Goodison (‘George Gower, Serjeant Painter to Queen Elizabeth’, The Burlington Magazine, XC, 1948, pp. 261-265; and ‘George Gower and Nicholas Hilliard’, The Burlington Magazine, XCI, 1949, p. 324) and E. Mercer (‘The decoration of the royal palaces from 1553-1625’, Archaeological Journal, CX, 1953, pp. 150-163; and English Art 1553-1625, Oxford, 1962, p. 173), Strong had used the three documented pictures to define an oeuvre for Gower based upon ‘certain recurrent stylistic tricks, particularly the out-turned, bulbous staring eyes which serve almost as a signature’ (R. Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture, London 1969, p. 167); the use of studio templates for the hands; and a distinctive Roman script with which Gower inscribed his pictures with mottos in English, Latin, French or Italian. This enabled him to identify twenty-five paintings by the artist dating to between 1572 and 1586. Through a combination of newly discovered documents and technical analysis of recorded and firmly attributed paintings, Town and David were able to provide the most complete account to date of Gower’s life and career, focusing on the early, formative period, to which the Fonthill portrait belongs. Their research shows that Gower was present in the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign and remained a favourite of the queen’s until his death, contributing significantly to our vision of her today.

A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE

Alfred Morrison was the second son of the merchant James Morrison (1790-1857), who, from very modest beginnings, experienced a meteoric rise in the textile industry in London. Alfred attended Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities, travelled regularly on the continent and spent over three years crisscrossing North America on behalf of his father’s merchant bank. While travelling with him in 1842, his elder brother Charles wrote home: ‘I have been observing Alfred – & do not think he will become a working man of business ... I think that nothing but necessity will induce him to become the inmate of a countinghouse ... [he] does not value money & does like his ease.’ Fortunately for Alfred, he would never be forced to become the ‘inmate of a countinghouse’. When his father died in 1857, Alfred inherited the Fonthill estate and £750,000 in stocks and shares. Alfred would use his inheritance to amass an extraordinary collection of art treasures, starting with the collection of engravings and Chinese art. His patronage of contemporary artists, such as Lord Frederic Leighton and John Brett, and of living craftsmen, earned him the title of the ‘Victorian Maecenas’. He was also a noted collector of autograph letters. Parallel to this interest in historical documents, Morrison showed in his collecting of Old Masters a strong predilection for portraits of historic and literary figures.