Welcome to Elizabethan England. “We might all think we know what the Elizabethan period looked like,” said Dr Tarnya Cooper, curator of Elizabeth I & Her People, the National Portrait Gallery’s major autumn exhibition. “The remarkable portraits of Elizabeth I as a static bejewelled queen and her courtiers in their finery are familiar from history books. This exhibition, based on new research, provides an alternative narrative and allows us to come face-to-face with a cast of other Elizabethans including butchers, soldiers, businessmen and women as well as writers and artists.”

More than face-to-face, in fact, for this exhibition includes objects that bring to life this examination of the Elizabethan world as well as portraits of the Virgin Queen, richly clad courtiers and advisors, and portraits commissioned by the new middle classes, or ‘middling sorts’. The personal belongings, from mundane pins, essential tools in Elizabethan dressing (to fix folds on ruffs and so on), and coins, to ornate accessories like an elaborately crafted sweet bag, diamond and emerald rings, and a frog-shaped purse, enhance the show enormously.

Oxford has been very generous in its loans to the exhibition, Cooper said, pointing first to the portrait of William Cecil riding his mule, loaned from the Bodleian Libraries. The rather charming portrait of Elizabeth’s closest advisor top-heavy on his mule (riding it around his grounds was his relaxation) contains several references to loyalty such as the inscription carved onto the tree translated as “One heart, one way.” The striking portrait of Sir Martin Frobisher is another Bodleian loan. The explorer, shown wheel-lock pistol in hand (a similar gun displayed nearby), was famous for his voyages in search of a Northwest Passage to China (‘Cathay’) for trade. The painting, which normally hangs high above a doorway in the Library (you can usually only see his feet easily, said Cooper), was painted in 1577 by Cornelis Ketel to celebrate Frobisher’s return from his second voyage.Among other exhibits, the Ashmolean Museum has loaned the little frog purse fashioned from leather, silk, silver-gilt thread, wire and glass beads.

The 100 works here tell us much about the nature of Elizabethan society, including the beginnings of a mercantile class and the rise in social mobility. Advances were being made in science, poetry, drama, exploration; the economy was commercialising rapidly, and for the first time many though not all had money to spend, for example on things like portraits.

So we get to see the butcher with the perfect name, Gamalier Pye; a brewing family who made good, ultimately becoming gentry; and the artist who suggests on his self-portrait by inscription and design (a set of scales, compass outweighing coat of arms) that his artistic skills carry more weight than his birthright as a gentleman. Thus began meritocracy. You don’t have to own land to succeed in Elizabethan times, commented Cooper. George Gower’s is the earliest known example of a large-scale self-portrait by a British artist. And John Donne’s, looking sweet lipped and suitably forlorn, is one of the earliest examples of portraits of a poet.

 

 

Elizabeth and her People
 

  • National Portrait Gallery
  • Until January 5
     
  • Visit npg.org