Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger

• 1. Introduction

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  Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger once painted Elizabeth I standing on a map of England, with her feet planted on the county of Oxfordshire. He was a Flemish painter working at the Tudor court, and a later assessment called him "the most important artist of quality to work in England in large-scale between Eworth and van Dyck". That is a striking claim for a man whose name rarely comes up beside the monarchs he painted. How did a newcomer from the Netherlands bring a new way of seeing to English portraiture? Why did the aging queen herself cool toward what he offered? And how did a painter so fashionable in the 1590s end his career working mostly for country gentry?

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• 2. Exile From Bruges

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  In Bruges, a boy named Marcus was born to the artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and his wife Johanna. Hardly anything is known about the father's paintings, yet his printmaking was renowned across Europe.

  Like other Protestant artists from the Habsburg Netherlands, the elder Gheeraerts fled to England with his son to escape persecution. This happened while the Duke of Alba governed the Netherlands. Johanna was a Catholic and stayed behind, and she is believed to have died a few years later.

  By 1568, records place father and son in the London parish of St Mary Abchurch, living with a Dutch servant. On the 9th of September 1571, the elder Gheeraerts married again. His new wife was Susanna de Critz, who came from an exiled family of Antwerp.

  Nobody knows who trained the young Marcus. His father is the likeliest teacher, and he was possibly also a pupil of Lucas de Heere. Records suggest he was working as a painter by 1586.

  In 1590, he married Magdalena, sister of his stepmother Susanna and of the painter John de Critz. The couple had six children, but only two seem to have survived. Marcus III, born around 1602, also became a painter, and a second son, Henry, lived from 1604 until August 1650.

  The family web of painters reached further still. In 1602, his half-sister Sara married the painter Isaac Oliver, a man whose miniatures would run parallel to Gheeraerts' large canvases for years to come.

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• 3. A Continental Eye

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  Around 1586, a set of portraits of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley was produced that Roy Strong identified as likely based on an original by Gheeraerts. The earliest works Gheeraerts himself signed date from around 1592.

  He was raised in England, yet his work looks continental. It stands far from the flat modelling of features and the pure, brilliant colours associated with Elizabethan artists such as Nicolas Hilliard. One scholarly view suggests that Oliver and Gheeraerts, singly or together, visited Antwerp in the late 1580s. There they may have absorbed the portrait style of Frans Pourbus.

  From around 1590, Gheeraerts led what has been called a "revolution" in English portraiture. For the first time in English art, sitters were rendered in three dimensions. Tonality and shadow gave a lifelike impression, and sombre colour and greyed flesh tones helped capture the character of each individual through close observation.

  He was also among the first English artists to paint on canvas rather than wood panel, which allowed much larger pictures. He introduced the full-length figure set outdoors in a naturalistic landscape for full-scale portraiture. Portrait miniatures of the same era already used that device.

  Those big canvases demanded help with backgrounds and details. The many surviving copies and variants of his works point to a workshop staffed by assistants and apprentices. His portraits of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex resemble Oliver's miniatures of the same sitter. Their portraits of Anne of Denmark later show similar likenesses too. Whether the two men collaborated or shared patterns is unknown.

  The first patron to make Gheeraerts truly fashionable, however, came from the world of court pageantry.

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• 4. Sir Henry Lee's Painter

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  In the autumn of 1590, Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley retired as Queen's Champion. Lee had been the architect of much of the chivalric pageantry at the court of Elizabeth I, and around that same year he became Gheeraerts' patron.

  Gheeraerts quickly became fashionable in court circles. He created emblematic portraits tied to the elaborate costumed iconography of Lee's Accession Day tilts, the jousting celebrations of the queen's reign.

  Around 1594, he painted Lee's cousin Captain Thomas Lee standing in a landscape. The captain wears Irish dress, and the imagery alludes to his service in Ireland.

  Gheeraerts also painted Sir Henry Lee himself several times. The best known of these is a full-length portrait of 1602 showing Lee in the robes of the Order of the Garter.

  Lee's connections reached to the most celebrated painting of Gheeraerts' career, made when the queen came to visit his estate.

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• 5. The Ditchley Portrait

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  In 1592, Elizabeth I made a two-day visit to Ditchley, Sir Henry Lee's estate in Oxfordshire. The Ditchley Portrait is likely to have been painted for that visit or to commemorate it. The queen probably sat to Gheeraerts for it, and the painting seems always to have hung at Lee's home.

  Behind her, storms rage. In front of her, the sun shines. Close to her left ear, she wears a jewel in the form of a celestial or armillary sphere.

  The canvas has since been trimmed, and its background was poorly repainted. As a result, the inscription and the sonnet that once accompanied the image are now incomplete.

  The new portrait style did not please the aging queen. Many versions of the painting were made with the allegorical items removed, most likely in Gheeraerts' workshop. In them her features are softened from the stark realism of the original face.

  One of these softened versions was sent as a diplomatic gift to Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. It is now in the Palazzo Pitti. Another Gheeraerts portrait of Elizabeth belongs to the collection of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  The queen's favourite, Robert Devereux, would prove an even more devoted patron of the painter.

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• 6. The Earl Of Essex

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  From 1596, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex employed Gheeraerts. From the mid-1590s he seems to have used him exclusively for large-scale portraits. His mother, Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester, was related to Sir Henry Lee, and like Lee he was an important participant in the Accession Day tilts.

  The first of these portraits is the full-length picture of 1596 now at Woburn Abbey. Essex stands in a landscape, and behind him burns the Spanish city of Cádiz. Many half-length and three-quarter-length portraits of Essex against plain backgrounds appear to be studio variants of sittings with Gheeraerts.

  The royal accounts for 1596-98 also include payments for decorative work by "Marcus Gerarde".

  Sir Roy Strong wrote of the Ditchley and Woburn Abbey portraits: "Gheeraerts' success lay in his ability to subdue the bourgeois robustness of Flemish painting and fuse it with the melancholic, aristocratic, courtly fantasy of late Elizabethan England... Elizabeth and Essex remain Gheeraerts' supreme works deserving to rank, along with some of Hilliard's portrait miniatures, as great masterpieces of early English painting."

  In 1601, both Essex and Thomas Lee were executed for treason after the Essex Rebellion. Gheeraerts' popularity does not seem to have suffered from his association with them.

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• 7. Under King James

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  Elizabeth died in 1603, but Gheeraerts stayed at the forefront of fashion in the years that followed. James I's queen, Anne of Denmark, employed him for large-scale paintings. She gave her miniature commissions to his brother-in-law Isaac Oliver.

  In 1611, Gheeraerts was paid for portraits of the King, the Queen, and Princess Elizabeth. A portrait attributed to him shows Anne, likely in mourning for her son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, in the winter of 1612-13.

  That same year, 1611, he painted Frances Howard, Countess of Hertford in rich attire. A draped silk curtain frames her, and a fringed pelmet runs across the top of the canvas. It is the first known use of a portrait setting that William Larkin, Hilliard's former apprentice, adopted for a series of full-length portraits between 1613 and 1618.

  Gheeraerts' Jacobean portraits are marked by what has been described as "quietness, pensiveness, and gentle charm of mood". This is seen in his portraits of Catherine Killigrew, Lady Jermyn, painted in 1614, and Mary Throckmorton, Lady Scudamore, painted in 1615.

  Within two years of that last portrait, a death in his own family circle would begin to shift his standing.

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• 8. A Fading Fashion

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  Isaac Oliver died in 1617. Around the same time, Gheeraerts' position at court began to decline, owing to competition from a new generation of immigrants.

  Anne of Denmark died in 1619. Gheeraerts took part in her funeral procession as "Queen's Painter". By then, however, the Netherlander Paul van Somer had likely displaced him as her chief portraitist.

  For the last twenty years of his life, Gheeraerts worked chiefly for the country gentry and for academic sitters. In the 1620s, he was a member of the Court of the Painter-Stainers' Company. His apprentice Ferdinando Clifton became a freeman of the Company in 1627.

  Gheeraerts died on the 19th of January 1636, nine years after Clifton gained his freedom.

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