English School c. 1595

half length, wearing an elaborately embroidered dress and holding a fan

Lea Castle, Wolverley

Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, Jubilee Exhibition, 1934 (lent by Mrs. Carpenter)

Sir Roy Strong, Portraits of Elizabeth I, 1965, p. 70, no. 75, illustrated facing p. 73

Please note a professional panel report is available. Below is a guide from the department. STRUCTURE The panel is original. PAINT SURFACE The general appearance is good. There are signs of some re-touching to the black areas of the dress, visible only on close inspection. Joins in the panel are visible in some areas, consistent with age. Frame abrasion marks are visible on the extreme edges of the panel which would be hidden if re-framed. ULTRAVIOLET Ultraviolet light reveals some very light and scattered re-touching to the paint surface. FRAME Held in a gilt and plain wood frame.
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'Her face oblong, fair but wrinkled, her eyes small, yet black and pleasant; her nose a little hooked, her lips narrow, topped with an auburn wig'.

The above comments by Paul Mentzner are a rare description of Queen Elizabeth's appearance when an old woman, as seen at Greenwich in 1598. However the Queen's ministers were not keen for the late portraits of the monarch to show any signs of old age or decay and strenuous attempts were made, not always successfully, to control the images which were produced. The celebrated proclamation of 1563 drafted by Cecil set out the process in which an approved painter would produce an image from which portraits by others might be derived.

In this portrait the Queen holds a fan embellished with precious stones, feathers and a cameo head. The cameo represents a Roman Empreror, a favourite subject of the Renaissance and Queen Elizabeth would have been well aware of it's significance.
The present portrait which dates from c. 1595 is derived from the most celebrated of these approved images, the so-called Darnley portrait named after the image formerly owned by the Earls of Darnley and now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. The Darnley portrait dates from circa 1575, the year in which the great Italian Mannerist artist Federigo Zuccaro made his brief visit to England, and Sir Roy Strong has argued that Zuccaro is likely to have painted this portrait.



The Darnley pattern continued to form the basis of many of the most famous portraits of the Queen up until the year of her death. These include the series known as the 'Sieve' portraits (an example of which was sold at Sotheby's on 25th November 1998, lot 9). The present portrait is dated by Sir Roy Strong to c. 1595 and, like the portrait now in the Weaver's Company, is one of the latest portraits to use the Darnley pattern. Not long afterwards in 1596, the year when George Gower the Queen's Sergeant Painter died, the Privy Council ordered unseemly portraits to be defaced and consigned to flames. No further images of the Queen depicting her in old age were produced and for the final years of her reign the Queen was depicted in a state of apparently eternal youth and beauty, one of the most celebrated examples being the 'Rainbow' portrait of c. 1600.

The present portrait hung at Lea Castle near Kidderminster, (Fig. 1) the seat of the Brown-Westhead family from whom it passed to the present owner. A tree-ring analysis of the panel produced by Dr Ian Tyers dates the panel to c. 1580-1596.