Artist of the Day, May 26, 2025: Marcus Gheeraerts, a Flemish artist, Renaissance (#2288)

Marcus Gheeraerts (1561 – 1636) was a Flemish artist working at the Tudor court, described as "the most important artist of quality to work in England in large-scale between Eworth and van Dyck". He was brought to England as a child by his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, also a painter. He became a fashionable portraitist in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I under the patronage of her champion and pageant-master Sir Henry Lee. He introduced a new aesthetic in English court painting that captured the essence of a sitter through close observation. He became a favorite portraitist of James I's queen Anne of Denmark, but fell out of fashion in the late 1610s.

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (sometimes known as Mark Garrard) was born in Bruges, the son of the artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder and his wife Johanna. Hardly anything is known of the paintings of the elder Gheeraerts, although his work as a printmaker was renowned in Europe.

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. 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, also a painter, and a son Henry. His half-sister Sara married the painter Isaac Oliver in 1602.

From around 1590, Gheeraerts led a "revolution" in English portraiture. 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. 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.

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.

Sir Henry Lee of Ditchley, who retired as Queen's Champion in the autumn of 1590, was the architect of much of the chivalric pageantry at the court of Elizabeth I. Lee became Gheeraerts' patron around 1590, and Gheeraerts quickly became fashionable in court circles,[7] creating emblematic portraits associated with the elaborate costumed iconography of Lee's Accession Day tilts. The queen likely sat to him for the Ditchley Portrait of her in 1592, which depicted her standing close to "Lee's Oxfordshire estate at Ditchley", and her favorite the Earl of Essex employed Gheeraerts from 1596. The royal accounts for 1596–98 also include payments for decorative work by "Marcus Gerarde".

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.

Essex (whose mother Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester was related to Sir Henry Lee) seems to have used Gheeraerts exclusively for large-scale portraits from the mid-1590s. The first of these is the 1596 full-length portrait of Essex at Woburn Abbey, where he stands in a landscape with the burning Spanish city of Cadiz in the background. Many half-length and three-quarter-length portraits of Essex with plain backgrounds appear to be studio variants of sittings to Gheeraerts.[10] Like Lee, Essex was an important participant in the Accession Day tilts.

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. In 1611 Gheeraerts was paid for portraits of the king, queen, and Princess Elizabeth. A portrait of Anne, likely wearing mourning for her son Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales in the winter of 1612-13 is also attributed to Gheeraerts.

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 Paul van Somer had likely displaced him as her chief portraitist some time before. For the last twenty years of his life Gheeraerts was employed chiefly by the country gentry and by academic sitters.

Gheeraerts was a member of the Court of the Painter-Stainers' Company in the 1620s and had an apprentice, Ferdinando Clifton, who was a freeman of the Company in 1627.
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Mark Gheeraerts portrait by Wenceslas Hollar

Portrait of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, circa 1585

Portrait of an Unknown Woman , circa 1590-1600

Sir Francis Drake, circa 1591

Called Mary Rogers, Lady Harington, circa 1592

Queen Elizabeth I, the Ditchley, circa 1592

Captain Thomas Lee, circa 1594

Elizabeth I, circa 1595

Portrait of an Unknown Lady, circa 1595

Anne, Lady Pope with her children, circa 1596

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Gheeraerts studio circa 1596

Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex in Garter robes, circa 1597

Barbara Gamage with Six Children, circa 1599

Sir Henry Lee, circa 1600

Unfinished portrait sketch of Sir Henry Lee, circa 1600

Portrait of the Three Egerton Sisters, circa1601-02

Portrait of a Boy Aged 2, circa 1608

Portrait of a 31-year-old man, circa 1609

Portrait of a Man in 1610 Classical Dress, possibly Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke,
circa 1610

Frances Howard, Countess of Hertford, circa 1611

Anne of Denmark, circa 1611-14

Anne of Denmark in Mourning, circa 1612

Catherine Killigrew, Lady Jermyn, circa 1614

Tom Durie, Anne of Denmark's fool, circa 1614

An unknown English noblewoman, possibly a member of the Strode family, circa 1615

Mary Throckmorton Lady Scudamore, circa 1615

Portrait of a Woman in Red, circa 1620

Susanna Temple sister of James Temple, circa 1621

Anne Hale, Mrs Hoskins, circa 1629

Portrait of a child feeding a pet rabbit

Portrait of France Howard, Countess of Hertford

Portrait Of Frances, Lady Dering