Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger was born in Bruges around 1561 or 1562, the son of a renowned printmaker and a Catholic wife who remained behind in the Habsburg Netherlands. His father, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, fled to England to escape the brutal persecution of the Duke of Alba, leaving his wife and the rest of their family to face the consequences of their faith. The elder Gheeraerts remarried in 1571 to Susanna de Critz, a member of an exiled family from Antwerp, and the two men lived with a Dutch servant in the London parish of St Mary Abchurch by 1568. Young Marcus grew up in this atmosphere of displacement and religious tension, likely trained by his father or possibly by Lucas de Heere, though no definitive records of his early education survive. He was active as a painter by 1586, and by 1590 he had married Magdalena, the sister of his stepmother and the painter John de Critz. The couple had six children, but only two sons survived to adulthood: Marcus III, who also became a painter, and Henry, who lived from 1604 to 1650. His half-sister Sara married the painter Isaac Oliver in 1602, weaving a tight-knit network of Flemish artists into the fabric of English court life.
A Revolution in Portraiture
The earliest signed works by Gheeraerts the Younger date from the late 1580s, but art historian Roy Strong identified a set of portraits of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, dated to around 1586, as likely based on an original by Gheeraerts. Unlike the flat modeling and pure, brilliant colors associated with Elizabethan artists such as Nicolas Hilliard, Gheeraerts introduced a continental aesthetic that rendered sitters in three dimensions through tonality and shadow. He was one of the first English artists to paint on canvas rather than wood panel, allowing for much larger pictures to be produced. He also introduced the full-length figure set out-of-doors in a naturalistic landscape for full-scale portraiture, a feature seen in portrait miniatures of the same era. This new style captured the character of individual sitters through close observation and the use of sombre color and greyed flesh tones. The need for assistants to complete the backgrounds and details of the new large canvas paintings, and the numbers of surviving copies and variants of Gheeraerts' works, suggest a studio or workshop staffed with assistants and apprentices. There are similarities of features between Gheeraerts' portraits of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and miniatures of Essex by his brother-in-law Isaac Oliver, but it is unknown whether the two artists collaborated or shared patterns for portraits.The Queen and the Map
Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley, who retired as Queen's Champion in the autumn of 1590, became Gheeraerts' patron around 1590, and the artist quickly became fashionable in court circles. Lee was the architect of much of the chivalric pageantry at the court of Elizabeth I, and Gheeraerts created emblematic portraits associated with the elaborate costumed iconography of Lee's Accession Day tilts. The Queen likely sat to him for the Ditchley Portrait of her in 1592, which depicted her standing close to Lee's Oxfordshire estate at Ditchley. In this image, the Queen stands on a map of England, her feet on Oxfordshire, with storms raging behind her while the sun shines before her. She wears a jewel in the form of a celestial or armillary sphere close to her left ear. The new portrait aesthetic did not please the aging queen, and in the many versions of this painting made with the allegorical items removed, likely in Gheeraerts' workshop, Elizabeth's features are softened from the stark realism of her face in the original. One of these was sent as a diplomatic gift to Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and is now in the Palazzo Pitti. The painting has been trimmed and the background poorly repainted, so that the inscription and sonnet are incomplete.