The world of portraiture in Tudor and Stuart England has no equivalent in today’s world; the kind of self-fashioning of images that we see on social media is perhaps a relic of this type of image-making, but it is still a long way from the deeply codified portraits that were popular among – and were indeed only available to – the elites of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These portraits aimed to show the viewer the status, power and wealth of the sitter. In the domain of the rich, such portraits were sites of display, in more than one sense of the word. When we look at these paintings, four hundred or even five hundred years after they were created, we need to ask of them: What are you showing me? What do you want me to see? What do you display? The clues are all there to be found.
Antonis Mor was a Netherlandish painter who worked across Europe, particularly for King Philip II of Spain. A work by Mor in the NGV Collection, Portrait of a lady, 1555–60 (Felton Bequest, 1948), is of an unknown woman, and while we may never know her name, we can discover a good deal about her from her portrait. At first glance it seems a sombre piece; the sitter stands at three-quarter and looks out of the canvas, meeting the viewer’s gaze with an unyielding stare. She is dressed in a jet-black dress with minimal details – dark-red sleeves on the forearms, a linen collar and cuffs with a white hood, or coif, to match. In one hand she clasps a large chain, which is looped around her waist almost like a belt, and in the other hand she holds a white handkerchief. The background is plain, dark, austere. Indeed, the whole image is austere. It was probably painted when Mor was in Brussels or Utrecht. The style of the clothes in the portrait is characteristic of this part of the world at the time, which was part of the Spanish Netherlands, so part of the Spanish Empire. The style is representative of Spanish fashions, which were quite sombre and austere, simple and unadorned – but this is a misleading simplicity.
Take, for example, the weighty gold chain she holds. She holds it up, but we still can’t see where it ends. For the viewer, it is of an endless length, symbolising the woman’s boundless wealth. It was no doubt heavy to wear – but that is of little consideration. This sitter does not need to work, to walk, to do anything. That is what the painting tells us. Black was a costly dye, and the colour faded quickly – it was only worn by those who could afford it, and only for the finest of occasions, such as sitting for your portrait.
The material of the sitter’s dress has a sheen to it; within the darkness of the background the fabric seems to catch an unseen source of light. This sits in contrast to the stripes of luxurious velvet, which draw down the bodice and the upper sleeves. The height of fashion at the time, the gown’s sleeves puff around the shoulders, making way for the rich, deep red velvet that tightly adorns the forearms. The lace cuffs around the wrists are pleated, which would have been no small feat; every one of those narrow folds would have been ironed into place by hardworking servants, as would have the pleated ruff collar that rises out from under the high neckline of the dress. Ruffs were in their infancy at this time, the mid sixteenth century, but they were about to reach their pinnacle. The lace hood, or coif, is of intricate workmanship, and its style is one of the things that places this portrait in the Netherlands rather than England, where Mor had recently been painting the marriage portrait of Queen Mary I for her prospective husband, Philip II of Spain.
We can see how the ruff has progressed in another NGV painting from England by an unknown artist, Portrait of a lady, 1570 (Felton Bequest, 1933). Here the ruff is an entirely separate garment, and it is an impressive piece of workmanship. The discovery of starch in the 1560s allowed the ruff to take on a life of its own, and it began to take pride of place in the outfits of fashionable courtiers. Aside from the more developed ruff, there are several parallels with Mor’s sitter: the English sitter is also unidentified, wears a tightly buttoned-up collar and holds a similarly unsmiling gaze in semi-profile. Though her expression is arguably softer, she is clearly a woman to be reckoned with. Embroidered with gold thread, her gown would have been made through an intricate and time-consuming process. Over the dress she wears a kind of doublet, black with silver embroidery following the same horizontal striped pattern as is found in the dress. It almost looks as though she is wearing a suit of armour, an impression that is highlighted by the garment’s exquisite gold embossed buttons.
Her coif, too, is almost helmet-like in that it is so adorned with gold and jewels that it seems more metal than fabric. It sits far back on her head to emphasise her golden red hair, thereby establishing a comparison between the sitter and her monarch, Elizabeth I. At this point, Elizabeth had been on the throne for more than a decade and was in her late thirties. She had not given in to pressure from her ministers to marry and continued to reign in her own right. Yet she walked a tightrope. While she used her own image to her advantage, it is also important to note how she controlled the appearance of those around her. Sumptuary laws dictating what colours and fabrics every class of society could wear had been active in England for a long time. In the 1570s Elizabeth I revisited the already stringent code, adding a number of clauses featuring extra constraints. One such clause tells us a lot more about our unidentified sitter:
None shall wear … Any cloth of gold, tissue, nor fur of sables: except duchesses, marquises, and countesses in their gowns, kirtles, partlets, and sleeves; cloth of gold, silver, of embroidered with gold or silver or pearl.
The pearls and embroidery of gold and silver are all present in the 1570 portrait. Therefore, the sitter must have been a duchess, marquise or countess – high society.
Sumptuary laws also applied to velvet, chains, buttons, enamel and jewels, all of which we can see in Portrait of a lady. They are also found in a portrait by an unknown artist held in the NGV Collection of Elizabeth’s great favourite, Robert Dudley, titled Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, 1565–70 (Felton Bequest, 1953). Very little in this portrait is notably different from those of the women. The subject’s doublet is buttoned high around the neck, the small buttons are enamel rather than jewelled, and he wears his ruff open at the neck, attached to his collar rather than as a standalone object. He wears a cap made from black velvet (a material reserved for high aristocracy and royalty) with a lustrous red feather and large gemstone instead of the coif, but in essentials his outfit is not so different and the pose is the same. These three paintings in the NGV share one key detail: they are all objects of splendour and display – of wealth, fashion and status – designed to show everyone lucky enough to be invited to the sitter’s home to see the portrait that they embodied all of those coveted qualities.
Portraits, then, were objects of self-fashioning, they were propaganda, and no-one harnessed the potential of this kind of image-making more than Queen Elizabeth I. There were copious images made of the ‘Virgin Queen’ and all of them were carefully crafted by Elizabeth I herself. This was largely because her legitimacy as queen was constantly in question. Firstly, she was a woman, and at this time women were not considered to be capable of ruling. Her sister before her, Mary I, had only reigned for four short years and was little precedent. As a child Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate when her mother was executed for adultery, and as an adult she had refused to marry, so she had no heir. Her long reign was punctuated with plots and fears of usurpation. She, more than anyone, had to constantly convince court and country that she was a legitimate monarch. She did this through the cultivation of her image.
An engraving in the NGV by Crispijn de Passe the elder after Isaac Olivier I, Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1603 (Everard Studley Miller Bequest, 1962), is a clearly recognisable image of the Virgin Queen. She wears a large ruff, a wide skirt held up by a structure known as a farthingale, a huge heart-shaped wired veil, also known as a headrail (these came into fashion in the 1590s), and a dress covered in pearls – perhaps rubies and emeralds, too – that would have been sewn by hand, taking many hours to create. It would have taken hours of preparation for the queen to be dressed in this manner.
First on would be a plain, loose-fitting slip and stockings pulled over the legs, held up with ribbons or garters. After this came the corset, which would have been made with wood or metal, or perhaps even bone. After this, a petticoat would be fastened to the waist before the elaborate farthingale wheel was added on top. Then would come the skirt of the dress, tied around the waist. Over the top of this was an object called a drum ruffle, which essentially softened the lines of the skirt. The bodice would be put on over the top and hooked onto the skirts. This would have a triangular stomacher, made of pasteboard or a thick canvas, pinned to the inside, which would give definition. These bodices were low-cut and gave the impression of a lengthy torso, overhanging the skirt in a peak. Elizabeth would sometimes wear a pearl at the bottom of the bodice, a symbol of her virginity. The sleeves of the dress, called farthingale sleeves, cannon sleeves or sometimes trunk sleeves – we would now say leg-of-mutton sleeves – would be attached separately again, hooked onto the bodice. Attached to these were jewel-studded drapes of cloth called hanging sleeves, which were, again, attached separately.
The pearls would have been placed around her neck next. These huge, heavy ropes almost entirely covered the cleavage left on show by the low bodice. Her earrings, too, probably went in now, while access to the ears was still easy. For then went on the ruff, called a cartwheel ruff, which was attached to the bodice. This was an enormous ruff, and no doubt the biggest at court – no-one was allowed a bigger ruff than the queen! This might have had around six hundred pleats, each starched by hand. After the 1590s it was usual for women’s ruffs to be open at the collar like this rather than closed like the image from the 1570s.
Once the ruff was on, the headrail was secured behind it. The headrail was mostly wire, with a material like gauze intricately woven through it. A malleable object, the headrail would be bent into shape, perhaps to look like wings or a heart. The queen would then have her wig put on, with the jewels and pearls already attached. The crown went on last, as her feet were squeezed into heeled shoes. When she was handed the orb and sceptre, she was finally ready. The weight of the jewelled fabric, the layer upon layer underneath, were all designed to contort and hold the body into the exact posture that we see in the engraving. She might wear these garments for hours upon hours.
Elizabeth I never went out in public without this regalia, but in private she was reportedly far more sedate in her choice of attire. Her seventeenth-century biographer, Edmund Bohun, reported in his 1693 book The Character of Queen Elizabeth that ‘she loved a Prudent and Moderate Habit in her private apartment and conversation with her own Servants’. It is perhaps little wonder. What would it have been like to wear this? How heavy, tight, cumbersome. These clothes were not meant to be practical; they were deliberately not practical. Their wearers were royal or aristocratic, eye-wateringly wealthy. They did not need to move, walk or work. This is exactly what they wanted to show viewers of their portraits. Dress and portraiture was all about image-making, myth-making. Bohun’s account went on to detail how:
when she appeared in Publick she was ever richly adorn’d with the most valuable cloaths, set off again with much gold, and Jewels of inestimable Value: and on such occasions she ever wore High Shooes, that she might seem Taller than indeed she was. The first day of the Parliament she would appear in a Robe embroidered with Pearls, the Royal Crown upon her Head, the Golden Ball in her Left-hand, and the Scepter in her Right; and as she never failed then of the loud Acclamations of her People, so she was ever pleased with it, and went to the House in a kind of Triumph, with all the ensigns of Majesty.
Bohun could not have been writing from life (he was only born in 1646, and this account was not published until 1693, ninety years after the death of Elizabeth), but this vivid account would seem to be replicated in the engraving by de Passe. Note the queen richly adorned with jewels of ‘inestimable’ value, the valuable cloths set off with gold, the pearls, the royal crown, and the orb and sceptre. The image this print was made from does not have the surrounding images, and the print itself was not made or circulated in the queen’s lifetime. It is dated 1603, the year of her death, which is alluded to in the left-hand side of the image with the line mortua anno misericordiae, ‘died in the year of mercy’. Other additions include the sword on the Bible, symbolising her role as head of the church and invoking her father’s title of defender of the faith; a symbol emphasised in the coat of arms above; and the line posui deum adiutorem, ‘I have made God my helper’. Another thing to note is that it is a print, not a painting: it was intended for mass circulation. This is a kind of majesty, a symbol of power, which transcends death – through it the image of the queen is made immortal. Bohun describing the queen as though he saw her tells us that the mythologising of the monarch that started in her life was perpetuated in the first years of the next dynasty, the Stuarts. It is to these Stuarts that we now turn.
UK-based Breeze Barrington is a cultural historian specialising in the artistic cultures of the seventeenth century, with a particular focus on women’s history and female artists. Her first book, The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court, will be published by Bloomsbury in July 2025.