Portraiture of Elizabeth I

Portrait of Elizabeth I of England in her coronation robes. Copy c. 1600–1610 of a lost original of c. 1559.

The portraiture of Elizabeth I illustrates the evolution of English royal portraits in the Early Modern period from the representations of simple likenesses to the later complex imagery used to convey the power and aspirations of the state, as well as of the monarch at its head.

Even the earliest portraits of Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) contain symbolic objects such as roses and prayer books that would have carried meaning to viewers of her day. Later portraits of Elizabeth layer the iconography of empire—globes, crowns, swords and columns—and representations of virginity and purity—such as moons and pearls—with classical allusions to present a complex "story" that conveyed to Elizabethan era viewers the majesty and significance of their Virgin Queen.

Overview

Portraiture in Tudor England

Main article: Artists of the Tudor court

Portrait miniature of Elizabeth as a princess, Levina Teerlinc, c. 1550

Two portraiture traditions had arisen in the Tudor court since the days of Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII. The portrait miniature developed from the illuminated manuscript tradition. These small personal images were almost invariably painted from life over the space of a few days in watercolours on vellum stiffened by being glued to a playing card. Panel paintings in oils on prepared wood surfaces were based on preparatory drawings and were usually executed at life size, as were oil paintings on canvas.

Unlike her contemporaries in France, Elizabeth never granted rights to produce her portrait to a single artist, although Nicholas Hilliard was appointed her official limner or miniaturist and goldsmith. George Gower, a fashionable court portraitist created Serjeant Painter in 1581, was responsible for approving all portraits of the queen created by other artists from that date until his death in 1596. Elizabeth sat to a number of artists over the years, including Hilliard, Cornelis Ketel, Federico Zuccaro or Zuccari, Isaac Oliver, and most likely to Gower and Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger.

Portraits were commissioned by the government as gifts to foreign monarchs and to show to prospective suitors. Courtiers commissioned heavily symbolic paintings to demonstrate their devotion to the queen. The fashionable long galleries of later Elizabethan country houses were filled with sets of portraits. The studios of Tudor artists produced images of Elizabeth working from approved "face patterns" or drawings of the queen to meet this growing demand for her image, an important symbol of loyalty and reverence for the crown in times of turbulence.

European context

Jane Seymour. Holbein, 1535-36

Mary I, Anthonis Mor, 1554

By far the most impressive models available to English portraitists were the many portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger, the outstanding Northern portraitist of the first half of the century, who had made two lengthy visits to England and been Henry VIII's court artist. Holbein had accustomed the English court to the full-length life-size portrait, although none of his originals survive. Both Holbein and his great Italian contemporary Titian had combined great psychological penetration with a sufficiently majestic impression to satisfy their royal patrons. Titian continued to paint royal portraits, especially of Phillip II of Spain, until the 1570s, but in sharply reduced numbers after about 1555, and he refused to travel from Venice to do them.

Towards the mid-century the most influential Continental courts came to prefer less revealing and intimate works, and at the mid-century the two most prominent and influential royal portraitists in paint, other than Titian, were the Netherlandish Anthonis Mor and Agnolo Bronzino in Florence, besides whom the the Habsburg court sculptor and medallist Leone Leoni should also be mentioned. Mor, who had risen rapidly to prominence in 1540s, worked across Europe for the Habsburgs in a tighter and more rigid version of Titian's compositional manner, drawing also on the North Italian style of Moretto. Mor had actually visited London in 1554, and painted three versions of his well-known portrait of Elizabeth's elder sister and predecessor Queen Mary I of England; he also painted English courtiers who visited Antwerp.

Mor's Spanish pupil Alonso Sánchez Coello continued in a stiffer version of his master's style, replacing him as Spanish court painter in 1561. Sofonisba Anguissola had painted in an intimately informal style, but after her recruitment to the Spanish court as the Queen's painter in 1560 was able to adapt her style to the much more formal demands of state portraiture. Moretto's pupil Giovanni Battista Moroni was Mor's contemporary and formed his mature style in the 1550s, but few of his spirited portraits were of royalty, or yet to be seen outside Italy.

Eleanor of Toledo and her son Giovanni, Bronzino, 1545.

Bronzino developed a style of coldly distant magnificence, based on the Mannerist portraits of Pontormo, working almost entirely for Cosimo I, the first Medici Grand-Duke. Bronzino's works, including his striking portraits of Cosimo's Duchess, Eleanor of Toledo were distributed in many versions across Europe, continuing to be made for two decades from the same studio pattern; a new portrait painted in her last years, about 1560, exists in only a few repetitions. At the least many of the foreign painters in London are likely to have seen versions of the earlier type, and there may well have been one in the Royal Collection.

Creating the royal image

Elizabeth Tudor as a Princess, c. 1546, by an unknown artist.

William Gaunt contrasts the simplicity of the 1546 portrait of Elizabeth Tudor as a Princess with later images of her as queen. He wrote, "The painter...is unknown, but in a competently Flemish style he depicts the daughter of Anne Boleyn as quiet and studious-looking, ornament in her attire as secondary to the plainness of line that emphasizes her youth. Great is the contrast with the awesome fantasy of the later portraits: the pallid, mask-like features, the extravagance of headdress and ruff, the padded ornateness that seemed to exclude all humanity."

From the 1570s, the government sought to manipulate the image of the queen as a object of devotion and veneration. Sir Roy Strong writes: "The cult of Gloriana was skilfully created to buttress public order and, even more, deliberately to replace the pre-Reformation externals of religion, the cult of the Virgin and saints with their attendant images, processions, ceremonies and secular rejoicing." The pageantry of the Accession Day tilts, the poetry of the court, and the most iconic of Elizabeth's portraits all reflect this effort. The management of the queen's image reached its heights in the last decade of the reign, when realistic images of the aging queen were replaced with an eternally youthful vision defying the reality of the passage of time.

Early portraits

The young queen

Elizabeth "in blacke with a hoode and cornet" c. 1560

The Hampden Portrait of Elizabeth I, by Van Der Meulen, 1560s.

An Elizabethan Maundy, miniature by Teerlinc, c. 1560.

Portraits of the young queen, many of them likely painted to be shown to prospective suitors and foreign heads of state, show a naturalness and restraint similar to those in the portrait of Elizabeth as a princess. The full-length Hampden image of Elizabeth in a red satin gown by Steven Van Der Meulen has been identified by Sir Roy Strong as an important early portrait, "undertaken at a time when her image was being tightly controlled. 'This is a portrait dating from the mid to late 1560s, one of a group produced in response to a crisis over the production of the royal image, one which was reflected in the words of a draft proclamation dated 1563,' he said." The draft proclamation (never published) was a response the the circulation of poorly-made portraits in which Elizabeth is shown "in blacke with a hoode and cornet," a style no longer in fashion. Symbolism in these pictures is in keeping with earlier Tudor portraiture; in some Elizabeth holds a book (possibly a prayer book) suggesting studiousness or piety. In other paintings she holds or wears a red rose, symbol of the Tudor Dynasty's descent from the House of Lancaster, or white roses, symbols of the House of York and of maidenly chastity. In the Hampden portrait, Elizabeth wears a red rose on her shoulder and holds a gillyflower in her hand. Of this image, Strong says "'Here Elizabeth is caught in that short-lived period before what was a recognisable human became transmuted into a goddess'."

One artist active in Elizabeth's early court was the Flemish miniaturist Levina Teerlinc who had served as a painter and gentlewoman to Mary I and stayed on as a Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber to Elizabeth. Teerlinc is best known for her pivotal position in the rise of the portrait miniature. There is documentation that she created numerous portraits of Elizabeth I, both individual portraits and portraits of the sovereign with important court figures, but only a few of these have survived and been identified.

Elizabeth and the goddesses

Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, 1569

Two surviving allegorical paintings show the early use of classical mythology to illustrate the beauty and sovereignty of the young queen. In Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses (1569), attributed to Hans Eworth, the story of the Judgement of Paris is turned on its head. Elizabeth, rather than Paris, is now sent to choose among Juno, Venus, and Pallas-Minerva, all of whom are outshone by the queen with her crown and royal orb. As Susan Doran writes, "Implicit to the theme of the painting ... is the idea that Elizabeth's retention of royal power benefits her realm. Whereas Paris's judgement in the original myth resulted in the long Trojan Wars 'to the utter ruin of the Trojans', hers will conversely bring peace and order to the state" after the turbulent reign of Elizabeth's sister Mary I.

The latter theme lies behind the 1572 The Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession (attributed to Lucas de Heere). In this image, Catholic Mary and her husband Philip II of Spain are accompanied by Mars the god of War on the left, while Protestant Elizabeth on the right ushers in the goddesses Peace and Plenty. An inscription states that this painting was gift from the queen to Francis Walsingham as a "Mark of her people's and her own content" and may indicate that it marks the signing of the Treaty of Blois (1572) which established an alliance between England and France against Spanish aggression in the Netherlands during Walsingham's tour of duty as ambassador to the French court. Strong identifies both paintings as celebrations of Elizabeth's just rule by Flemish exiles to whom England was a refuge from the religious persecution of Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands.

Hilliard and the queen

The Phoenix Portrait, c. 1575, by Hillard.

Emmanuel College charter, 1584

Nicholas Hilliard was an apprentice to the Queen's jeweller Robert Brandon, a goldsmith and city chamberlain of London, and Sir Roy Strong suggests that Hilliard may also have been trained in the art of limning by Levina Teerlinc. Hilliard emerged from his apprenticeship at a time when a new royal portrait painter was "desperately needed." Two panel portraits long attributed to him, the Phoenix and Pelican portraits, are dated c. 1572–76.

Miniature by Hillard, 1572

Hilliard's first known miniature of the Queen is dated 1572. It is not known when he was formally appointed limner (miniaturist) and goldsmith to Elizabeth, though he was granted the reversion of a lease by the Queen in 1573 for his "good, true and loyal service." But Hilliard's panel portraits were somehow found wanting, and in 1576 the recently married Hilliard left for France to improve his skills. Returning to England, he continued to work as a goldsmith, and produced some spectacular "picture boxes" or jewelled lockets for miniatures: the Armada Jewel, given by Elizabeth to Sir Thomas Heneage and the Drake Pendant given to Sir Francis Drake are the best known examples. As part of the cult of the Virgin Queen, courtiers were rather expected to wear the Queen's likeness, at least at Court.

His appointment as miniaturist to the Crown included the old sense of a painter of illuminated manuscripts and he was commissioned to decorate important documents, such as the founding charter of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1584), which has an enthroned Elizabeth under a canopy of estate within an elaborate framework of Flemish-style Renaissance strapwork and grotesque ornament. He also seems to have designed woodcut title-page frames and borders for books, some of which bear his initials.

The Darnley Portrait

The Darnley Portrait, c. 1575

The problem of an official portrait of Elizabeth was solved with the Darnley Portrait. Likely painted from life around 1575–6, this portrait is the source of a face pattern, called the "Mask of Youth" by art historians, which would be used and reused for authorized portraits of Elizabeth in the decades to come, preserving the impression of ageless beauty. Sir Roy Strong has suggested that the artist is Federico Zuccari or Zucaro, an "eminent" Italian artist, though not really a specialist portrait-painter, who is known to have visited the court briefly with a letter of introduction to Elizabeth's favourite Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester dated 5 March 1575. Zuccaro's preparatory drawings for full-length portraits of both Leicester and Elizabeth survive, although it is unlikely the full-length of Elizabeth was ever painted.

The Darnley Portrait features a crown and sceptre on a table beside the queen, and was the first appearance of these items separately used as props and symbols of sovereignty in Tudor portraiture; a theme that would be expanded in later portraits..

The Virgin Empress of the Seas

Return of the Golden Age

The Ermine Portrait, William Segar, 1585. Elizabeth as Pax.

The excommunication of Elizabeth by Pope Pius V in 1570 led to increased tension with Philip II of Spain, who championed the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots as the legitimate heir of his late wife Mary I. This tension played out over the next decades in the seas of the New World as well as in Europe, and culminated in the invasion attempt of the Spanish Armada.

It is against this backdrop that the first of a long series of portraits appears depicting Elizabeth with heavy symbolic overlays of imperial dominion based on mastery of the seas. Combined with a second layer of symbolism representing Elizabeth as the Virgin Queen, these new paintings signify the manipulation of Elizabeth's image as the destined Protestant protector of her people.

Strong points out that there is no trace of this iconography in portraits of Elizabeth prior to 1579, and identifies its source as the conscious image-making of John Dee, whose 1577 General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation encouraged the establishment of a British Empire supported by a strong navy, asserting Elizabeth's claims to imperial status via her supposed descent from Brutus of Troy and King Arthur.

Dee's inspiration lies in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, which was accepted as true history by Elizabethan poets and formed the basis of the symbolic history of England. In this 12th century pseudohistory, Britain was founded by and named after Brutus, the descendent of Aeneas who founded Rome. The Tudors, of Welsh descent, are heirs of the most ancient Britons and thus of Aeneas and Brutus. By uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster following the strife of the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors ushered in a united realm where Pax reigned. The Spenserian schoar Edwin Greenlaw states "The descent of the Britons from the Trojans, the linking of Arthur, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth as Britain's greatest monarchs, and the return under Elizabeth of the Golden Age are all commonplaces of Elizabethan thought." This understanding of history and Elizabeth's place in it forms the background to the symbolic portraits of the latter half of her reign.

The Virgin Queen

The Sieve Portrait, Quentin Metsys the Younger, 1583

A series of Sieve Portraits use the Darnley Portrait face pattern with an allegorical overlay that depicts Elizabeth as Tuccia, a Vestal Virgin who proved her chastity by carrying a sieve full of water from the Tiber River to the Temple of Vesta without spilling a drop. The first Sieve Portrait was painted by George Gower in 1579, but the most influential image is the 1583 version by Quentin Metsys (or Massys) the Younger. In this painting, Elizabeth is surrounded by symbols of empire, including a column and a globe, iconography that would appear again and again in her portraiture of the 1580s and 1590s, most notably in the Armada Portrait of c. 1588. The medallions on the pillar to the left of the queen illustrate the story of Dido and Aeneas, ancestor of Brutus, suggesting that like Aeneas, Elizabeth's destiny is to reject marriage and found an empire. This painting's patron was likely Sir Christopher Hatton (his heraldic badge of the white hind appears on the sleeve of one of the courtiers in the background), and the work may express opposition to the proposed marriage of Elizabeth to François, Duke of Anjou.

The Ermine Portrait of 1585, attributed to the herald William Segar, portrays the queen with another Elizabethan symbol of purity, the ermine. The queen bears the olive branch of Peace, and the sword of justice rests on the table at her side.

Visions of empire

The Woburn Abbey version of the Armada Portrait, c. 1588

The Ditchley Portrait, Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c.1592

Main article: Armada Portrait

The Armada Portrait is an allegorical panel painting depicting the queen surrounded by symbols of empire against a backdrop representing the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

There are three surviving versions of the portrait, in addition to several derivative paintings. The version at Woburn Abbey, the seat of the Dukes of Bedford, is generally accepted as the work of George Gower, who had been appointed Serjeant Painter in 1581. A version in the National Portrait Gallery, London, which has been cut down at both sides leaving just a portrait of the queen, is also attributed to Gower. A third version, owned by the Tyrwhitt-Drake family, may have been commissioned by Sir Francis Drake. Scholars agree that this version is by a different hand, noting distinctive techniques and approaches to the modelling of the queen's features.

The combination of a life-sized portrait of the queen with a horizontal format is "quite unprecedented in her portraiture", although allegorical portraits in a horizontal format, such as Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses and the Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession pre-date the Armada Portrait.

The queen's hand rests on a globe below the crown of England, "her fingers covering the Americas, indicating England's dominion of the seas and plans for imperialist expansion in the New World". The Queen is flanked by two columns behind, probably a reference to the famous impresa of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, Philip II of Spain's father, which represented the pillars of Hercules, gateway to the Atlantic Ocean and the New World.

In the background view on the left, English fireships threaten the Spanish fleet, and on the right the ships are driven onto a rocky coast amid stormy seas by the "Protestant Wind". On a secondary level, these images show Elizabeth turning her back on storm and darkness while sunlight shines where she gazes, iconography that would be repeated in Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger's 1592 Ditchley Portrait of the queen.

The cult of Elizabeth

The various threads of mythology and symbolism that created the iconography of Elizabeth I combined into a tapestry of immense complexity in the years following the defeat of the Spanish Armada. In poetry, portraiture and pageantry, the queen was celebrated as Astraea, the just virgin, and simultaneously as Venus, the goddess of love. Another exaltation of the queen's virgin purity identified her with the moon goddess who holds dominion over the waters. Sir Walter Raleigh had begun to use Diana and later Cynthia as aliases for the queen in his poetry around 1580, and images of Elizabeth with jewels in the shape of crescent moons or the huntress's arrows begin to appear in portraiture around 1586 and multiply through the remainder of the reign.. Courtiers wore the image of the Queen to signify their devotion, and had their portraits painted wearing her colours of black and white.

The last sitting

Unfinished miniature, Oliver, c. 1592

Portrait by an unknown artist, c. 1595.

The Rainbow Portrait, c. 1600–02, unknown artist

Around 1592, the queen sat to Isaac Oliver, a pupil of Hilliard, who produced an unfinished portrait miniature (left) used as a pattern for engravings of the queen. Only a single finished miniature from this pattern survives, with the queen's features softened, and Strong concludes that this realistic image from life of the aging Elizabeth was not deemed a success.

Prior to the 1590s, woodcuts and engravings of the queen were created as book illustrations, but in this decade individual prints of the queen first appear, based on the Oliver face pattern. In 1596, the Privy Council ordered that unseemly portraits of the queen which had caused her "great offence" should be sought out and burnt, and Strong suggest that these prints, of which comparatively few survive, may be the offending images. In any event, no surviving portraits dated between 1596 and Elizabeth's death in 1603 show the aging queen as she truly was. All subsequent images rely on the Mask of Youth, portraying Elizabeth as ever-young.

The Rainbow Portrait

Perhaps the most heavily symbolic portrait of the queen, the Rainbow Portrait, was painted around 1600–1602, when the queen was in her sixties. In this painting an ageless Elizabeth appears dressed as if for a masque, in a linen bodice embroidered with spring flowers and a mantle draped over one shoulder, her hair loose beneath a fantastical headdress. She wears symbols out of the popular emblem books: the cloak with eyes and ears, the serpent of wisdom, the celestial armillary sphere, and carries a rainbow with the motto non sine sol iris ("no rainbow without the sun"). Strong suggests that the complex "programme" for this image may be the work of the poet John Davies, whose Hymns to Astraea honouring the queen use much of the same imagery, and suggests it was commissioned by Robert Cecil as part of the decor for Elizabeth's visit in 1602, when a "shrine to Astraea" featured in the entertainments of what would prove to be the "last great festival of the reign".

"Reading" the portraits

It may be impossible for modern viewers to see the all of hundreds of images of Elizabeth as her subjects, courtiers, and rivals saw them. The portraits are steeped in classical mythology and the Renaissance understanding of English history and destiny, filtered by allusions to Petrarch's sonnets and, late in the reign, to Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. Dame Frances Yates points out that the most complexly symbolic portraits may all commemorate specific events or have been designed as part of elaborate themed entertainments. The most widely recognizable portraits of Elizabeth—the Armada, Ditchley, and Rainbow portraits—are all associated with unique events in this way. To the extent that the contexts of other portraits have been lost to scholars, so too the keys to understanding these remarkable images as the Elizabethans understood them may be lost in time.

According to Roy Strong,

Fear of the wrong use and perception of the visual image dominates the Elizabethan age. The old pre-Reformation idea of images, religious ones, was that they partook of the essence of what they depicted. Any advance in technique which could reinforce that experience was embraced. That was now reversed, indeed it may account for the Elizabethans failing to take cognisance of the optical advances which created the art of the Italian Renaissance ... They certainly knew about these things but, and this is central to the understanding of the Elizabethans, chose not to employ them. Instead the visual arts retreated in favour of presenting a series of signs or symbols through which the viewer was meant to pass to an understanding of the idea behind the work. In this manner the visual arts were verbalised, turned into a form of book, a 'text' which called for reading by the onlooker. There are no better examples of this than the quite extraordinary portraits of the queen herself, which increasingly, as the reign progressed, took on the form of collections of abstract pattern and symbols disposed in an unnaturalistic manner for the viewer to unravel, and by doing so enter into an inner vision of the idea of monarchy."

Gallery

Queen and court

• 
  Unknown artist, The Family of Henry VIII, with Elizabeth on the right, c. 1545
• 
  Elizabeth and the Ambassadors, attributed to Levina Teerlinc, c. 1560
• 
  The Family of Henry VIII, an Allegory of the Tudor Succession, 1572, attributed to Lucas de Heere
• 
  The Procession Portrait, c. 1590, Robert Peake the Elder

Portrait miniatures

• 
  Teerlinc, c. 1565
• 
  Teerlinc, c. 1565
• 
  Hilliard, c. 1580
• 
  The queen with a crescent moon jewel in her hair, Hilliard, 1595-1600

Portraits

• 
  The Gripsholm Portrait, 1563
• 
  The Pelican Portrait, c.1575, by Nicolas Hilliard
• 
  Preliminary chalk sketch for a portrait of Elizabeth I by Zuccaro, c. 1575
• 
  The Peace Portrait, 1580–85, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder. Elizabeth holds the olive branch of peace.
• 
  One of five known portraits attributed to John Bettes the Younger or his studio, c. 1585–90
• 
  Another of many portraits of its type, c. 1585–90, artist unknown
• 
  The Jesus College Portrait, c. 1590, attributed to Hilliard
• 
  The Hardwick Hall Portrait, Hilliard workshop, 1592

Portrait medallions and cameos

• 
  Sir Christopher Hatton wearing a cameo of the queen, 1589, unknown artist (?after Ketel)
• 
  Sir Francis Drake wearing the Drake Pendant, a cameo of the queen. Gheeraerts the Younger, 1591

Woodcuts, engravings and prints

• 
  Engraving based on the Oliver pattern of c. 1592
• 
  Engraving by William Rogers c. 1592
• 
  Elizabeth as Rosa Electa, Rogers, 1590-95

See also

• Artists of the Tudor Court
• Elizabeth I of England
• Cultural depictions of Elizabeth I of England
• 1550-1600 in fashion

References

• Arnold, Janet: "The 'Coronation' Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I", The Burlington Magazine, CXX, 1978, pp. 727–41.
• Arnold, Janet: Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd, W S Maney and Son Ltd, Leeds 1988. ISBN 0-901286-20-6
• Doran, Susan. "Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I" (PDF). The Myth of Elizabeth. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Retrieved 2008-10-24. ISBN: 9780333930847.
• Freedburg, Sidney J. Painting in Italy, 1500-1600, 3rd edn. 1993, Yale, ISBN 0300055870
• Gaunt, William: Court Painting in England from Tudor to Victorian Times. London: Constable, 1980. ISBN 0094618704.
• Gent, Lucy, and Nigel Llewellyn, eds: Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660Reaktion Books, 1990, ISBN 0-948462-08-6
• Hearn, Karen, ed. Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630. New York: Rizzoli, 1995. ISBN 0-8478-1940-X (Hearn 1995)
• Hearn, Karen: Marcus Gheeraerts II Elizabeth Artist, London: Tate Publishing 2002, ISBN 1854374435 (Hearn 2002)
• Kinney, Arthur F.: Nicholas Hilliard's "Art of Limning", Northeastern University Press, 1983, ISBN 0930350316
• Levey, Michael, Painting at Court, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1971
• Penny, Nicholas, National Gallery Catalogues (new series): The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, Volume 1, 2004, National Gallery Publications Ltd, ISBN 1857099087
• Reynolds, Graham: Nicholas Hilliard & Isaac Oliver, Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1971
• Strong, Roy: The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture, 1969, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London (Strong 1969)
• Strong, Roy: Nicholas Hilliard, 1975, Michael Joseph Ltd, London, ISBN 0718113012 (Strong 1975)
• Strong, Roy: The Cult of Elizabeth, 1977, Thames and Hudson, London, ISBN 0500232636 (Strong 1977)
• Strong, Roy: Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520–1620, Victoria & Albert Museum exhibit catalogue, 1983, ISBN 0905209346 (Strong 1983)
• Strong, Roy: Art and Power; Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650, 1984, The Boydell Press;ISBN 0851152007 (Strong 1984)
• Strong, Roy: "From Manuscript to Miniature" in John Murdoch, Jim Murrell, Patrick J. Noon & Roy Strong, The English Miniature, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1981 (Strong 1981)
• Strong, Roy: Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, Thames and Hudson, 1987, ISBN 0500250987 (Strong 1987)
• Strong, Roy: The Spirit of Britain, 1999, Hutchison, London, ISBN 185681534X (Strong 1999)
• Trevor-Roper, Hugh; Princes and Artists, Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg Courts 1517-1633, Thames & Hudson, London, 1976, ISBN 0500232326
• Waterhouse, Ellis; Painting in Britain, 1530–1790, 4th Edn, 1978, Penguin Books (now Yale History of Art series)
• Yates, Frances: Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, London and Boston: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1975, ISBN 0710079710