 |
| Anonymous painter working in England Portrait of a lady, called Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield 1615 oil on canvas Tate, London |
 |
| Robert Peake Portrait of Lady Anne Pope 1615 oil on panel Tate, London |
 |
| Paul van Somer Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Grey, Countess of Kent ca. 1619 oil on panel Tate, London |
"The daughter and co-heiress of the 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, Lady Elizabeth Talbot (1581-1651) married Henry Grey, Lord Ruthven (died 1639) in 1601; he succeeded his father as 8th Earl of Kent in September 1623. . . . The present painting is known to have belonged to Charles I (1600-1649), the son of James and Anne, as it appears in the inventory of his collection made in about 1639. Lady Grey had been a favoured attendant of Anne of Denmark and had walked in her funeral procession as a Countess Assistante. The fact that she is attired in black, including wearing black jewellery in the form of expensive egg-shaped jet beads, suggests that this portrait may relate to the mourning period after the Queen's death. Under her heart she wears a jewel – possibly a closed portrait-miniature case – with the crowned monogram AR – standing for Anna Regina. A similar miniature case, containing the Queen's portrait and presumably given by her to another of her attendants, Lady Anne Livingston, survives in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The signet ring on a black ribbon round Lady Kent's wrist may also have a memorialising significance. It is engraved with the image of a breed of dog known as a talbot – evidently a punning reference to her own maiden surname. Her extremely low decolletage is a fashion paralleled in other Jacobean female portraits, including those of Queen Anne herself. Such exposure, even for ladies of mature years, was evidently considered entirely acceptable, although presumably confined to an elite court circle only."
 |
| Marcus Gheeraerts II Portrait of a woman in red 1620 oil on panel Tate, London |
 |
| Anonymous painter working in England Portrait of Anne Wortley, later Lady Morton ca. 1620 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"This typifies the British Jacobean portrait formula. The subject appears full length and almost facing the viewer, standing on a rich carpet or, as here, on rush matting, flanked by lustrously painted curtains. There may be an accompanying chair or table, but the artist shows no interest in conveying its spatial relationship to the figure. The costume is meticulously depicted, with an almost hallucinatory clarity. Anne Wortley's face and hands are painted in a more shadowed manner associated with Netherlandish-trained artists. The portrait may have been produced by painters collaborating in a workshop, rather than by a single artist."
 |
| Cornelius Johnson Portrait of an unknown lady 1629 oil on panel Tate, London |
 |
| Cornelius Johnson Portrait of an unknown gentleman 1629 oil on panel Tate, London |
 |
| Anthony van Dyck Portrait of a lady of the Spencer family ca. 1633-38 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Painted during the 1630s, this is the type of full-length portrait by van Dyck that was to influence subsequent English portrait-painters from Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) to John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). This image of a young woman in a blue satin gown was recorded at Althorp, Northants, the family seat of the Earls of Spencer, in the early eighteenth century, although knowledge of the identity of the sitter had by then been lost. . . . Van Dyck has had a greater impact on British portrait-painting than any other artist. He was born and trained in Antwerp and first visited England in 1620-21, before moving to Italy where he assimilated the works of Titian and other Venetian painters. In 1632 he returned to England and entered the service of Charles I, where he reinvented the visual imagery of the English court."
 |
| Anonymous painter working in England Portrait of William Style of Langley 1636 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"The costly black-and-white floor is a feature more commonly seen in Dutch paintings of this period, although it is now thought that very few such floors existed in reality. The curious object and the Latin motto at his feet, to which Style so purposefully points with his cane, would have been easily understood by his contemporaries: Microcosmus Microcosmi non impletur Megacosmo can be translated as The microcosm (or heart) of the microcosm (or man) is not filled (even) by the megacosm (or world) – that is to say that the human heart is not sated with the whole created world, but only with its Creator. This image of a globe within a burning heart could have been inspired by Peter Heylyn's Microcosumus: A little description of the Great World (1621). Heylyn and Style overlapped as students at Oxford University (Heylyn matriculated in 1617 and subsequently became a high-churchman)."
 |
| William Dobson Portrait of the artist's wife ca. 1635-40 oil on canvas Tate, London |
 |
| Anthony van Dyck Portrait of Mary Hill, Lady Killigrew 1638 oil on canvas Tate, London |
 |
| William Dobson Portrait of an officer ca. 1645 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Dobson was one of the few top-level painters of his era to have been born in Britain. The rather Venetian freedom with which he handles paint suggests that he must have had access to Charles I's exceptional collection of Italian paintings. This unknown officer holds a horseman's pistol in his left hand. In his right hand is a charging-spanner, which contains priming powder and a spanner for winding up the pistol-lock. After the outbreak of the English Civil War, Dobson spent the final part of his life in Oxford, where Charles I and his court lived in near-siege conditions."
 |
| Edward Bower Portrait of Sir John Drake 1646 oil on canvas Tate, London |
 |
| Cornelius Johnson Portrait of an unknown lady 1646 oil on canvas Tate, London |
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London