Portrait of young man, aged 27, half-length, in a tan slashed doublet, holding gloves

‘He [Eworth] takes his place along with Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger as the most important large-scale painter working in England between the death of Holbein and the arrival of van Dyck’ (R. Strong, ‘Hans Eworth Reconsidered’, The Burlington Magazine, CVIII, May 1966, p. 226). This finely-rendered portrait of a dashing young man was executed by the Flemish émigré painter Hans Eworth, who arrived in London from Antwerp in the mid-1540s and was active during the reigns of Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I. He created some of the most recognisable and iconic images of the Tudor period, including the celebrated Turk on horseback (Portrait of Suleiman the Magnificent), dated 1549 (UK Private Collection); the Allegorical portrait of Sir John Luttrell, dated 1550 (fig. 1; London, Courtauld Institute); and one of the best-known portrait types of Queen Mary of England (1554; London, Society of Antiquaries). Eworth was adept at both religious and mythological paintings, but focused his talents mainly on portraiture, a genre in which he excelled. His portraits, such as the one presented here, are particularly distinguished for their ability to capture the subtleties of a sitter’s likeness and character, a quality found in few other surviving portraits of English sitters at this date. Paintings by Eworth very rarely appear on the market, this being only the second portrait by him to be offered at auction in the last thirty years.

As one of the most talented artists working in mid- to late-Tudor England, Eworth’s work and career have attracted considerable scholarly attention. For centuries his work was confused with that of another Flemish émigré, Lucas de Heere (1534-1584), who worked in England between 1567 and 1576, largely due to Eworth’s distinctive ‘HE’ monogram being misinterpreted by George Vertue in the early-eighteenth century. Lionel Cust corrected this error in an article on Eworth, published in the Walpole Society in 1913, which constituted the first scholarly treatment of the painter. Sir Roy Strong organised the first monographic exhibition of the artist’s work at the City of Leicester Museums & Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1965-1966, and assigned 35 works (25 of them signed) to Eworth in his ground-breaking work on Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture, The English Icon (1969). Most recently, Tarnya Cooper and Hope Walker’s piece on ‘Talent and Adversity: A reassessment of the life and works of Hans Eworth in Antwerp and London’ has shed much light on the practice, patronage and technique of one of the few artists working in mid-sixteenth century England whose work and career can be reasonably well documented (see Painting in Britain 1500-1630: Production, Influence and Patronage, Oxford, 2015, pp. 226-331). To date, 48 pictures have been identified with what would appear to be authentic monograms or can be linked through documentary evidence.

This striking portrait was recognised as a work by Eworth when it was with Asscher & Welker in 1929. It was briefly misattributed to the Flemish painter Pieter Pourbus (1523-1584) in the mid-twentieth century, but was restored to Eworth’s oeuvre at the Brighton exhibition in 1956, and is now widely acknowledged as a mature work by the artist. Recently, scholars have noted the shared compositional model with Eworth’s Portrait of Richard Wakeman of Beckford (1566; London, Private collection), and stylistic affinities with the Portrait of a gentleman of the Selwyn family (fig. 2; 1572; London, Wallace Collection). Typical of Netherlandish practice at the time, Eworth’s technique involved thinly applied paint layers built up in a meticulous manner. His works were usually extremely carefully planned, probably making use of numerous preparatory drawings, which were then carefully transferred. Infrared reflectography of the current painting reveals that the panel was prepared in the usual way for Antwerp school painting of the period, with a broadly-brushed, light-coloured imprimatura, showing that Eworth remained true to his Antwerp training even after his years in England. The underdrawing, which is partly visible to the naked eye and more fully revealed by infrared reflectography (fig. 3), shows the artist working with speed and precision, a hallmark of his technique. Dendrochronological analysis by Ian Tyers, to whom we are grateful (report dated May 2023, available upon request), has shown that the two oak boards that make up the panel support are eastern Baltic, derived from the same tree, with the latest heartwood ring of 1553 and a dating between circa 1559 and circa 1593, which tallies with the date on this panel of ‘1571’.

Eworth came from a family of jewellers, goldsmiths and painters. His precise birth date is not known, but his family emigrated from Hoorn to Antwerp in 1540, where he joined the Painters’ Guild of St Luke. Eworth travelled to London in the mid-1540s with a relative, Nicholas Eewouts, possibly to escape religious persecution. He is recorded as living at various locations throughout the city – from the parish of St Thomas’s Hospital and Lord Montague’s liberty in St Mary Overie, Southwark, to Bridewell House in the precinct of Bridewell Palace – and obtained his letters of denization in October 1550. His talent was clearly recognised in 1554 when he was granted a sitting from life with Queen Mary I, the same year she sat for Antonis Mor. Eworth does not appear to have gained significant royal patronage under Queen Elizabeth I, which may have been due to his close associations with her half sister Mary, or his perceived Roman Catholic sympathies due to his links with a number of Roman Catholic patrons, or indeed due to his mimetic style not being to her taste. In the late 1560s and 1570s, Eworth travelled regularly between London, Calais and Antwerp. He is recorded in both London and Antwerp in the year this portrait is dated, 1571, leaving the possibility open that the sitter could have been painted in either of those two cities. He died at the end of 1578 or beginning of 1579, probably in Antwerp.

This portrait was in the collection of the financier James Geoffrey Hart and his wife Dorothy Irene in the second quarter of the twentieth century and is likely to have been one of their first purchases following their marriage in 1930. Together they filled their house Wych Cross Place in the Ashdown Forest with an important collection of Old Master paintings, the core of which was Flemish, including works by Sir Anthony van Dyck, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Anthonis Mor, paintings by fifteenth century Flemish Primitives and landscapes attributed to Joachim Patinir and Herri met de Bles. Following James’ untimely death in 1946, Dorothy moved the collection first to her London house at 9 Hyde Park Gardens and later to Villa Millbrook at St. Lawrence, Jersey. While Dorothy stopped collecting when her husband died, her love of art endured, and the collection became a major focus of her attentions. She lent the whole of the collection to exhibitions in Worthing in 1952 and in Brighton in 1956.

This painting will be included in Hope Walker’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Hans Eworth.