RA Magazine Autumn 2013

Issue Number: 120

Elizabeth I portraits at the National Portrait Gallery

As the National Portrait Gallery mounts a show of the Tudor queen, John Cooper uncovers the hidden meaning behind one of the key works

Is the Virgin Queen really being carried by four swaggering courtiers? Look closely at The Procession Portrait of Queen Elizabeth (c.1600-03), one of the star canvases of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition ‘Elizabeth I and her People’, and one finds, immediately behind the Queen’s litter, a groom in crimson livery pushing a wheeled chair of state. The courtiers in fact bear the canopy protecting Elizabeth from the elements, but it’s the humble servant who actually takes the strain. Is this a Renaissance revival of a Roman imperial triumph, or a concession to the Queen’s advancing age?

_{Artist Unknown, 'The Procession Portrait of Queen Elizabeth', c.1600-03. © Sherborne Castle, Dorset.}

The Procession Portrait is emblematic of the late-flowering cult of Elizabeth. The 18th-century critic George Vertue was unsure about the quality of the painting, deciding that it was ‘not well or ill done’. The perspective in the painting, however, was calculated with skill. From the ethereally floating Queen, the eye is drawn down to the balding figure of Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester, in red in the foreground, the angle of Elizabeth’s stomacher pointing like an arrow towards him. The turn of Worcester’s body directs us towards his son Lord Herbert, in white, who holds the gaze of the viewer while gesturing towards his new bride Anne Russell. Elizabeth attended their wedding in 1600, appointing Worcester her Master of the Horse the following year. The portrait celebrates these marks of favour towards a Catholic family at a time when both sides of the religious divide may have been suing for peace.

Chief curator at the National Portrait Gallery Dr Tarnya Cooper says the show aims to present an ‘alternative narrative’ of the Elizabethan age, focusing on social mobility and the rising middle class, and the genteel subjects watching the royal procession remind us that owning such a portrait could itself be a passport to respectability.

• Elizabeth I and Her People is at the National Portrait Gallery from 10 October– 5 January 2014

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