All the Queen’s men- and rodents

I know I’m still running horribly behind on writing up the exhibitions I’ve been to see- I guess I’ll have to make a New Year’s resolution to be a bit more timely and assiduous with this blog….

At least the one I’m writing about now is still (just) running if you get a move on and go to the National Portrait Gallery in London.   It deals with portraiture in the reign of Elizabeth I- starting at the top with pictures of the Queen herself and working down through the social classes.   Obviously there’s a limit to how far down the social scale portraiture went; nobody was in the business of painting individual members of the labouring poor just because they had interesting faces (there was no market for that) though one or two favoured servants get into aristocratic or gentry family scenes as in the beautifully depicted nurse holding the infant John Dunch  above  (little John fell victim to the horrendous rate of infant mortality of the time). 

   Nor does there appear to have been much of a taste for the genre scenes drawn from everyday life which make Dutch painting of the 16^th and 17^th centuries something of a window into the lives of fairly ordinary people- even if one which needs to be looked through with caution.   The scene of  festivities in the village of Bermondsey which may (or may not) be by the Dutch artist Joris Hofnagel above is a rarity and a slightly enigmatic one as it’s not certain what the cause of the rejoicing actually is (traditionally it’s assumed to be a wedding on the strength of the very large cakes being carried in procession in the right foreground and the fiddlers playing but there are some problems with this interpretation and it’s even been interpreted as a royal visit to the village).   

The poor (who were, on the whole, getting poorer through Elizabeth’s reign, which was anything but a golden age for the majority of the population) don’t get much of a look in despite genuine efforts on the part of the exhibition curators to find ways of acknowledging them- of which the most startling is the presence of an intact set of clothes in rough brown cloth which appear to have belonged to a sailor (judging from tar residues in the fibres) and amazingly survived the centuries because they became part of a collection of props passed on from artist’s studio to artist’s studio until the late 19^th century.  In some ways this is the most startling item in the show because of the sheer length of odds against the survival of something so commonplace.

With this proviso, it is still noticeable how far down the social scale the commissioning of portraits in Elizabethan England went- indeed contemporary social commentators mocked the vanity of very minor civic dignitaries and petty attorneys in sitting for their portraits.   Perhaps worse, even their wives were getting in on the act, as were the tiny number of women with a professional activity in their own right like the calligrapher Esther Langlois/Inglis/Kello above (strictly speaking she shouldn’t have been in the show as she lived in Scotland for most of her life and only came to London after Elizabeth’s death and the accession of James VI as James I in England- but she did produce beautiful manuscripts for a cross-border elite market).

Brewers and butchers like the aptly named Gamaliel Pye ensured that their looks were commemorated for posterity.  Pye indeed embodies the ambiguities of the age, as a man who was highly respected in his trade, a generous donor to charity- and a convicted breaker of legislation which controlled slaughtering and imposed price controls on meat.  

There was at times a degree of unease about the process of having your likeness taken, at least among those of a more religious cast of mind who worried about breaking the Second Commandment.  This perhaps explains the tendency of portraits- especially those of the ”middling sort” and lesser gentry- to include very visible signs of piety like skulls to assist meditation on mortality or moralising inscriptions.  It may partly also explain the tendency to cite the age at which the portrait was painted- this was evidently used as a stimulus to pious thoughts and reflections on the passage of time itself as the musician Thomas Whythorne explained in his memoirs.

Others, not all of them necessarily that much higher up the social scale, appear to have had fewer scruples about portraiture.   The flamboyant assertiveness of Martin Frobisher (pirate, slaver-trader, Arctic explorer, bankrupt, captain of a Queen’s ship….) doesn’t suggest a man with many scruples about the propriety of having his image recorded, though in an earlier age a semi-literate West Country skipper would hardly have qualified for this sort of immortalisation.  Admittedly this was something of an institutional commission, done on behalf of the Cathay Company which had been set up to exploit trade with China through the North West Passage which Frobisher was seeking in the Arctic.   His navigations in the Davis Strait and into Baffin Bay for a brief moment looked as if they would more than pay their way even without reaching China when rocks he brought back were assayed as containing gold- fools gold, as it transpired, as the voyage to ship back piles of stone for treatment pushed the Company to the edge of bankruptcy and the absence of gold sent it over.  The Queen, who had invested her own money in the venture, was not at all amused and Frobisher was out of favour for years until his services were required to fight the Spanish Armada.  The stone, incidentally, can still be seen in the defences of Dartford….

Portraiture was obviously more of a regular feature of life for an aristocracy much obsessed with lineage and descent- the Elizabethan period stood at the very start of the English elite preoccupation with creating galleries of paintings depicting members of a noble lineage over the generations as one way of asserting the legitimate descent of property and lands.  At times the portraits formed part of displays which set them in a wider context and are now lost or were destroyed as tastes changed, which perhaps leads to an overestimate of just how important each individual painting actually was, but their basic role in preserving the memory of great (or notorious) ancestors is clear.  Not every aristocratic portrait in the show fitted into this model.  For instance the distinctly intimate depiction of  the Countess of Southampton  below is unique and must have been created for very particular reasons, possibly for the benefit of a husband who had drawn the Queen’s displeasure by marrying her at all (they both spent some time in prison as a result). 

  The show contains several more conventional paintings of family groups or husband and wife pairings and I suspect a genuinely representative collection of portraits from the period would contain even more- there’s a natural tendency to focus on paintings which either depict important individuals or are in some way interesting or idiosyncratic.   Perhaps the most unlikely presence in the show is the Sultan of Morocco’s ambassador, who had come to London in the hope of getting English help to open up a new front in the war against Spain (he failed, though the English had little vested objection to collaborating with Islamic states against their shared enemy and when King James made peace with Spain early in his reign a number of English sailors went off to join the Barbary corsair states).

The quality of art on display is pretty variable.   It’s understandable that work undertaken by jobbing painters in provincial centres is pretty stiff and naïve but even the rich and aristocratic could struggle to get a quality piece done and often had to rely on passing Dutch or Flemish artists.  Elizabeth’s court never managed to attract any genuinely top drawer artists from continental Europe (the best of them, Hans Eworth, was hardly in the Holbein league), possibly because her notorious parsimony on everything expect perhaps her personal adornment made it an unattractive place to seek work.  Her Sergeant Painter George Gower’s self-portrait stresses how his artistic skills trump his gentry origins as the basis for his claims to enhanced social status but he, like other English artists of the time, was distinctly old fashioned, happier with the texture of textiles and draperies than in trying to depict a human body in a credible three dimensional space.   

It didn’t help that the most talented artists in England were miniaturists like Nicholas Hilliard or Isaac Oliver; men brilliant at squeezing a depiction into a tiny space (say for a ring or a pendant) but rather at sea when it came to working on a grader scale- a couple of works in the show have been tentatively attributed to Hilliard but they have little of the quality of his miniatures.  

The portraits of Elizabeth herself are therefore a bit of a mixed bag, often longer on recording the sheer magnificence of her frocks and jewellery than on giving a half way credible depiction of what she looked like (this was definitely not a culture in which less was more or where restraint was in any way valued).   Matters got ever more complex as she grew older.   While the portrait at the top of this piece, dating from the 1570’s, probably gives a fair sense of what the queen looked like in her forties (and a formidable lady she appears to be), the same cannot be said of later depictions.  In some cases (for instance when a royal portrait was commissioned by an aristocrat as a visible symbol of loyalty for the Great Hall) the painter might well never have seen the monarch at close quarters and would have to rely on earlier portraits or even the images on the coinage to get a sense of her appearance.   In others there was a simple refusal to depict the ageing Queen as she really was.  

Take the rather odd painting below as an example, in which Elizabeth participates in a procession involving key members of her court (she is not actually being borne shoulder high like some kind of devotional statue in a religious procession- the men are carrying a canopy as she is pushed on a kind of trolley by a couple of Yeomen of the Guard half visible behind her).  This was painted some time after 1600.   It’s probably not a depiction of a specific event and the whole thing has a very stagey look in part because of the thoroughly unconvincing perspective and background.   For all that, the various members of the procession are recognisable, as is the message it’s intended to convey of an elite group solidly grouped round their monarch.   The balding figure in pink in the foreground, the Earl of Worcester, may well have commissioned the work to celebrate his restoration to favour as Master of the Horse (in charge, inter alia, of court ceremonials of this very kind)  after the Earl of Essex was sacked for crossing Elizabeth once too often.  His son, Lord Herbert, is the man in white striking postures on the right- possibly pointing to his newly married wife.   On the face of it, this depicts a cohesive elite united around their queen.  Elizabeth, though, is depicted as if she was still in the 1570’s.  By the time this was painted she was an increasingly frail old woman verging on her seventies, with rotting teeth and a red wig.  The increasingly hysterical courtly adulation of the Virgin Queen in the 1590’s and into the 1600’s (Thomas Morley’s madrigal collection “The Triumphs of Oriana” dates from more or less the same time as this painting) scarcely hid the extreme nervousness of the elite over what was going to happen when she eventually died or what upheavals might occur in her dotage- Essex was to die on the scaffold in 1601 for a crack-brained attempt at a palace coup.  Plots and counter-plots abounded.   Sir Walter Raleigh was up to his neck in them, for instance, including (as historical research over the past fifty years has demonstrated) dabbing in treason with the Spanish.  In the end James VI of Scotland succeeded with minimal stir (not least because key members of the Elizabethan establishment had already put plans in place for that to happen)- the fact that he was an adult male Protestant with children ultimately trumping his Scottishness, especially as the alternative contenders were all female.   The painting depicts a moment when nobody could have been sure that England would avoid a civil war when the old woman died and the official line was to wish that day away by pretending that she was blessed with eternal youth.

I don’t think Elizabeth would have been entirely happy over the fact that she was a bit upstaged in what she would certainly have regarded as her show.   She could probably have lived with the prominence given to the so-called “Ermine Portrait”- after all, its main subject is her, in one of her most fantastical confections of a dress (how on earth did one set about cleaning something like that?  Or was it a one-off, shredded after one wearing with the jewels reused in subsequent gowns?).  The ermine had a respectable place in bestiary lore as a symbol of cleanliness and, by extension, virginity- it was believed that it would pine away and die if its white fur ever got dirty.- and therefore sat nicely within the ideology crafted to glorify the dead end into which she had opted to take her dynasty because she saw no other way of resolving the inherent contradictions involved in being a Queen Regnant in a world where it was axiomatic that a woman was always subordinate to her husband.  

I’m not sure she’d have been so happy with the thought that the star painting in the exhibition and the one which caused most head-scratching over gallery merchandising involved three anonymous children and their pets- see below.   The children look very solemn indeed and the boy on the right looks as if he’s about to strangle his linnet in his efforts to make sure it doesn’t fly away.   The real interest surrounds his elder sister’s guinea pig.  Evidently drawn from the life, this is the earliest depiction of the humble South American rodent in British art.   It must have been a rather exotic pet- guinea pigs, native to Peru, were unknown to Europeans until the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire- and one wonders how this specimen ended up in England.  Cute it may have been but it had no distinguished pedigree of symbolism and implied meanings derived from antiquity to legitimise its place in a painting and I assume it was there because its owner threatened tantrums unless her pet joined her in the painting.   The gallery shop was doing a roaring trade in cuddly toy guinea pigs; there was no postcard available because the painting is in private hands and hasn’t been put on display very often.   The Virgin Queen should have been aware of the old theatrical maxim about appearing with children and animals……

Happy New Year to my readers- I will try to be more assiduous in 2014, honest!