The present picture is a version of a type of which the prime, three-quarter-length, version is considered by Sir Roy Strong to be that in the Wingfield Collection at Barrington Park (see R. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, Oxford, 1963, p. 57, no. 12). A number of smaller versions are recorded but none show the same costume or the Queen's hand holding a prayer book. Strong argues that the Barrington type may have been evolved in about 1563. The frame is substantially contemporary and the fact that its format is not typical of the 1560s suggests, as he points out, that the painting was intended to join a very early series of arch-topped portraits of sovereigns.