This exquisite oil on copper portrait, painted around 430 years ago, is a splendid survival from the Elizabethan era - the golden age in England’s history, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne. It is a time that is sandwiched between two golden ages of English renaissance culture, the reigns of Henry VIII and Charles I. This period produced a style of painting quite unlike that anywhere else in Europe and one that deserves serious assessment. Just a couple of years after our portrait was painted, English painting developed on another course, driven mainly by the artists Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger and Isaac Oliver; they depicted a new mood that was pervading Elizabethan and Jacobean society, which was that of romantic melancholy. Elizabethan painting came to an end when Henry, Prince of Wales, sought a complete change of style of his father’s court.
The portrait depicts a gentleman wearing fashionable clothing for the period - a black doublet, intricately detailed with gold thread, and a white ruff and lace cuffs edged in lace. He holds gloves in his left hand and a felt conical capotain hat (which was worn indoor as well and outdoor) in his right hand. The clothing, but most specifically, the type and width of the ruff and the height of the hat help to date the portrait to circa 1595. This sitter’s assumed confidence and refined costume, in the most expensive colour to dye and maintain, suggest he was a wealthy figure of some standing society.
Surviving portraits from this period are relatively rare, considering that of the two percent of the population which made up the gentry classes and above, most would not have owned anything beyond that of family portraits and one of the reigning monarch. The work is exceptionally well preserved, revealing details of the artist’s technique that are often lost in works of this age. The minute brushwork in the ruff and highlights of the gold detail on the doublet indicate a sophisticated level of modelling.
In Elizabethan collections there was a total absence of painter’s names and they were often unrecorded and deemed unimportant, and sadly, the period lacked a contemporary chronicler, apart from Francis Meres (who provided only a cryptic list). Therefore, less than a century later, the names of native artists had completely faded from memory, apart from a few well known artists such as Nicholas Hilliard, who was Queen Elizabeth I’s limner, George Gower (fl.c.1540-1596), and Robert Peake (1551-1619).
Held in a fine gilded period carved and gesso frame.
Hieronimo Custodis, originally from Antwerp, was among the numerous Flemish artists at the Tudor court who fled to England to escape the persecution faced by Protestants in the Spanish Netherlands. It is believed that he arrived in England after the capture of Antwerp by the Duke of Parma's forces in 1585.
Three portraits attributed to Custodis, inscribed and dated in 1589, firmly establish his residency in London by that year; however, a dated portrait of Edward Talbot confirms that he was already present there in 1586. By 1591, he resided in the parish of St. Bodolph-without-Aldgate, London, where "Jacobus, the son of Ieronyme Custodis, A Paynter," was baptized on March 2. It is presumed that he died in 1593.