Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
Marcus Gheeraerts (also written as Gerards or Geerards; c. 1561/62 – 19 January 1636) was a Flemish
Family
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (sometimes known as Mark Garrard
Like other
It is not known by whom young Marcus was trained, although it is likely to have been his father. He was possibly also a pupil of Lucas de Heere. Records suggest that Marcus was active as a painter by 1586.[5] In 1590, he married Magdalena, the sister of his stepmother Susanna and of the painter John de Critz. The couple had six children, only two of whom seem to have survived—a son, Marcus III (c. 1602 – c. 1654), also a painter, and a son Henry (1604 – August 1650).[4] His half-sister Sara married the painter Isaac Oliver in 1602.[6]
Career
A new aesthetic
The earliest signed works by Gheeraerts the Younger date from c. 1592, but
From around 1590, Gheeraerts led a "revolution" in English portraiture.[8] For the first time in English art sitters were rendered in three dimensions, achieving a lifelike impression through tonality and shadow. New too were capturing the character of individual sitters through close observation and the use of sombre colour and greyed flesh tones.[8][9] Gheeraerts was one of the first English artists to paint on canvas rather than wood panel, allowing much larger pictures to be produced. He also introduced the full-length figure set out-out-of-doors in a naturalistic landscape for full-scale portraiture, a feature seen in portrait miniatures of the same era.[4][6][9]
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 Gheeraert's portraits of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and miniatures of Essex by Gheeraerts' brother-in-law Isaac Oliver, and later between their portraits of Anne of Denmark, but it is unknown whether the two artists collaborated or shared patterns for portraits.[10]
Elizabethan success
Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley, who retired as
The Ditchley Portrait seems to have always been at Lee's home in Oxfordshire, and was likely painted for (or commemorates) her two-day visit to Ditchley in 1592. In this image, the queen stands on a map of England, her feet on Oxfordshire. The painting has been trimmed and the background poorly repainted, so that the inscription and sonnet are incomplete. Storms rage behind her while the sun shines before her, and she wears a jewel in the form of a celestial or
Around 1594, Gheeraerts painted a portrait of Lee's cousin Captain Thomas Lee standing in a landscape wearing Irish dress. The iconography of the portrait alludes to Captain Lee's service in Ireland.[14] Gheeraerts also painted several portraits of Sir Henry Lee himself, including a full-length portrait in his robes of the Order of the Garter (1602).[15]
Essex (whose mother
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.[16]
Gheeraerts' popularity does not seem to have been tainted by the patronage of participants in the
Jacobean years
Gheeraerts remained at the forefront of fashion in the years immediately following Elizabeth's death in 1603. James I's queen, Anne of Denmark, employed Gheerearts for large scale paintings and his brother-in-law Isaac Oliver for miniatures.
His 1611 portrait of Frances Howard, Countess of Hertford in rich attire framed by a draped silk curtain, with a fringed pelmet across the top of the canvas, is the first known instance of a portrait setting that would be used by Hilliard's former apprentice William Larkin in a series of full-length portraits between 1613 and 1618.[8][20] Overall, Gheeraerts' portraiture in the Jacobean era is characterized by the "quietness, pensiveness, and gentle charm of mood"[16] seen in his portraits of Catherine Killigrew, Lady Jermyn (1614) and Mary Throckmorton, Lady Scudamore (1615).
Isaac Oliver died in 1617, and around the same time Gheeraerts' position at court began to decline as the result of competition from a new generation of immigrants. Anne of Denmark died in 1619, and although Gheeraerts was part of her funeral procession as "Queen's Painter", the Netherlander
Gheeraerts was a member of the Court of the
Gallery
Elizabethan
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Portrait of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, after 1585, oil on panel, attributed to Gheeraerts,National Portrait Gallery, London
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Sir Francis Drake, 1591.
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"Softened" portrait of Elizabeth I, Gheeraerts studio, Palazzo Pitti, Florence
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Called Mary Rogers, Lady Harington, 1592, oil on panel.
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Portrait of an Unknown Woman 1590-1600. Oil on canvas,Hampton Courtlong thought to have been a pregnant Queen Elizabeth I owing to the frame having a plaquard saying Queen Elizabeth it is now believed to have been a swapped frame.
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Captain Thomas Lee, oil on canvas, 1594
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Portrait of an Unknown Lady, c. 1595 (possibly Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester)
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Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Gheeraerts studio c. 1596
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Anne, Lady Pope with her children, 1596, National Portrait Gallery, London
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Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex in Garter robes, c. 1597, National Portrait Gallery, London
Jacobean
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Portrait of a Boy Aged 2, 1608, Compton Verney
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Frances Howard, Countess of Hertford, 1611, oil on canvas
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Anne of Denmark in Mourning (possibly for her son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales), c. 1612
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National Galleries of Scotland
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Mary Throckmorton Lady Scudamore, 1615, oil on panel, National Portrait Gallery London
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Portrait of a Woman in Red, 1620, oil on canvas, Tate
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Blanche Parry [24]
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Margaret Laton, c. 1620, Victoria and Albert Museum
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Anne Hale, Mrs Hoskins, 1629, oil on panel
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Susanna Temple sister of James Temple, 1621, oil on canvas, sold 2000
See also
- Artists of the Tudor court
- Portraiture of Elizabeth I of England
Notes
- ^ a b Strong 1969, p. 22
- ^ Engraving in England in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries: a descriptive catalogue with introductions, CUP, p. 104
- ^ The one known portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder is the 1586 Wanstead Portrait of Elizabeth I. Hearn 2003, p. 33.
- ^ a b c d Hearn 2003, pp. 11–14
- ^ A record differentiates "Marcus Geraerts (oude) schilder" (that is, the elder painter); Hearn 2003 p. 12
- ^ a b c Hearn 2001, p. 121
- ^ a b c d Strong 1969, pp. 269–71
- ^ a b c Strong 1993, p. 76
- ^ a b Hearn 1995, p. 177
- ^ a b Hearn 1995, p. 178
- ISBN 978-0-563-48714-2.
- ^ "Trinity College, University of Cambridge". BBC Your Paintings. Archived from the original on 19 November 2014.
- ^ Strong 1987, pp. 135–37.
- ^ Hearn 1995, p. 176
- ^ Hearn 2003, p. 18
- ^ a b Strong 1969, p. 23
- ^ Hearn 1995 lists this portrait as by Gheeraerts; Hearn 2003 calls it a studio copy of the signed three-quarter-length version in the Royal Collection, likely cut down from a full-length portrait.
- ^ Hearn 2003, p.34
- ^ a b Hearn 1995, p. 192
- ^ Hearn 2003, p. 37
- ^ Hearn 2003, p.35
- ^ Strong 1969, p. 24
- ^ Hayes 1992, p. 111
- ^ "Marcus The Younger Gheeraerts - Blanche parry". en.artsdot.com. Archived from the original on 7 February 2019. Retrieved 11 February 2019.
References
- Collins Baker, C. H. Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters. 2 vols. London, 1912, 1:21–35.
- Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 111.
- Hearn, Karen, ed. Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630. New York, Rizzoli, 1995. ISBN 0-8478-1940-X.
- Hearn Karen, "Insiders or outsiders? Overseas-born artists at the Jacobean court." In Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton,From Strangers to Citizens: The Integration of Immigrant Communities in Britain, Ireland, and Colonial America, 1550–1750, Sussex Academic Press, 2001, ISBN 1-902210-86-7
- Hearn, Karen, and Rica Jones, Marcus Gheeraerts II: Elizabethan Artist, London, Tate Gallery, 2003, ISBN 1-85437-443-5.
- Millar, Sir Oliver. "Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger: A Sequel through Inscriptions." The Burlington Magazine 105 (1963): 533–541.
- Poole, Mrs. Reginald Lane. "Marcus Gheeraerts, Father and Son, Painters." The Walpole Society 3 (1914): 1–8.
- Strong, Roy, "Elizabethan Painting: An Approach through Inscriptions. III. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger." The Burlington Magazine 105 (1963): 149–157.
- Strong, Roy, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture. London and New York City, 1969: 21–24, 269–304.
- Strong, Roy, "The Surface of Reality: William Larkin", FMR No. 61, April 1993, Franco Maria Ricci Int., New York, ISSN 0747-6388.