Elizabeth Peyton

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York

Private Collection

Christie’s, London, 6 February 2003, Lot 739

Private Collection, USA

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2003

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the face is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Earl of Essex, undoubtedly referring to the ill-fated 2nd Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux (1566-1601), is a portrait of a historical figure and yet should not be considered as a historical portrait. In Elizabeth Peyton’s celebrated small-format portraits a powerful element of fantasy accompanies the realism of her paintings. Peyton is determined to capture the essence of an individual, an essence carefully chosen by her according to her own personal intuition. In the present portrait, Peyton successfully pulls the Earl of Essex away from his formal, historical context, and places him in her own creative universe. 

In contrast to the frontal or formal three-quarter turn pose familiar to historical portraits, the Earl’s pose is oddly casual. Young and fair-skinned, Peyton has portrayed him with blue eyes, neatly achieving a colour balance between the head and the painting’s sky-blue background. The artist's choice of a plain blue background is both reminiscent of the lapis lazuli of Old Master portraits and also the monochrome grounds of later twentieth-century portrait artists such as David Hockney, Andy Warhol or Alex Katz, who equally make use of a uniform bright backdrop to accentuate a desired mood. In the case of Earl of Essex, Peyton’s choice of a light-blue tone alludes to an innocent yet melancholic attitude. The boldness of the Earl’s red lips, cheeks and hair further emphasises his detachment from reality and induction into the realm of the fantastic. Much like Peyton's re-imagined hearthrobs, film stars and tragic characters such as Kurt Cobain that populate her enigmatic portraits, in Earl of Essex she re-imagines the aristocratic earl as a contemporary pin-up. 

As critic Hilton Als describes: “Peyton’s famous faces are partly shaped by stillness, by silence, which is to say they always appear to be reflecting on this moment: the moment of being looked at by Elizabeth Peyton, who doesn’t think twice about exposing what she thinks on the surface of a canvas” (Hilton Als, ‘Pressed’, in: Exh. Cat., St. Louis, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (and travelling), Ghost: Elizabeth Peyton, 2011, p. 94). In her gentle portrayal of the English nobleman, one is reminded of the aristocrat’s great suffering and infamous demise. Peyton successfully captures the eternal youth of the Earl, who, having led an abortive coup d'état against the government, was tried and executed for treason at age thirty-five in 1601.

Earl of Essex is an intriguing example of the juxtaposition between the widespread understanding of Robert Devereux in popular culture and Peyton’s fertile imagination. The idealised form, colour and texture of the man’s facial features, the delicately placed ruff around his neck and his suggestive gaze truly incarnate a romanticised perception of the historical figure. Peyton captures the aura of Devereux, a man viewed as “a tragicomic figure, romantic and dramatic but psychologically unstable: an ‘Elizabethan Icarus’ who flew too close to the sun and suffered the consequences” (Janet Dickinson, Court Politics and the Earl of Essex, New York 2012, p. 2). Rather than taking the viewer on a journey back to the Sixteenth Century, Peyton achieves the revival of the Earl within our modern-day context. The well-chronicled life of the 2nd Earl of Essex is given a new life through the artist’s contemporary brushstrokes.