The Construction of Whiteness, Gender and Race in Early Modern Portraits

Introduction

Cultural institutions such as Tate are increasingly recognising and reckoning with conventions of collection interpretation that have sustained and perpetuated racism and white supremacy. As a Black gallery guide working at Tate for more than twenty years, I have noticed how white visitors have grown more sophisticated when looking at and responding to historical images that include Black figures. Unfettered by the usual reticence accompanying discussions on race, and often with evident enjoyment, visitors respond to the presence of the Black figure by engaging in a debate on transatlantic enslavement and British imperialism. I listen while they explain how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black figure became a semiotic device that is used to accentuate the ideological and aesthetic value of whiteness.

However, when I introduce them to the early modern gallery, where the Black figure is conspicuous by its absence, all talk of race and difference is set aside. The discussion turns to Thomas Lee’s ‘scant attire’ in Marcus Gheeraerts II’s Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee 1594 (Tate T03028), the ‘very pregnant woman’ in Gheeraerts’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady c.1595 (Tate T07699) and ‘those twins, bolt upright in bed with their babies’ in The Cholmondeley Ladies c.1600–10 (Tate T00069) by an unknown artist. Many viewers do not recognise whiteness as a racial construction. In the absence of a diminutive Black page or servant acting as a semiotic clue, the enunciation of white racial superiority and colonial exploits in early modern portraits usually remains invisible and unremarked upon. This position is supported by the wall captions and accompanying online collection texts for such works, which make no reference to whiteness.

The study of Blackness and its cultural construction has been increasingly present in art history departments and museums in recent decades. Art historian Albert Boime has argued that racial signifiers are entrenched in the language and conventions of western art history and practice:

Whiteness studies is a growing field, predicated on the belief that meaningful analysis of the term ‘race’ and its corresponding power structures must acknowledge constructed racial whiteness. The 2024 exhibition Entangled Pasts 1768–Now: Art, Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy, London, which sought to address the role of both art and the institution in the shaping of colonialism, included a room entitled ‘Constructions of Whiteness’.3 Here whiteness was presented through a white child nervously recoiling from the attentions of a Black vendor in William Mulready’s The Toy Seller 1857–63 (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) and in the form of a white cotton tablecloth extending the length of the dining table occupied by a group of white men in Frederick William Elwell’s 1938 painting The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee, 1938 (Royal Academy, London).

Whiteness studies emerged in the 1990s with the work of white cultural theorists such as Ruth Frankenberg, Richard Dyer and David Roediger.4 The controversial ‘Making and Unmaking of Whiteness’ conference, hosted by the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, produced what is now described as a ‘second wave’ of whiteness studies.5 Such work has been understood as a response to the 1992 book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by novelist and cultural critic Toni Morrison, who, together with scholar and activist bell hooks, demanded a making visible, ‘through a close look at literary “blackness”, the nature – even the cause – of literary whiteness’.6 These writers were in turn informed by the work of Black theorists such as James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois.7 As early as 1920, Du Bois recognised the reality of racial whiteness, describing its manifestations as creating a ‘new religion of whiteness’.8 The scholarship of modern literary critics such as Kim F. Hall, Urvashi Chakravarty and Peter Erickson has applied whiteness studies to the early modern period.9 However, apart from brief sojourns into the visual arts,10 their focus is on theatre and literature.

This paper seeks to bring ideas of whiteness to bear on three portraits from the early modern period in Tate’s collection. It begins with an interview between myself and Christopher Griffin, former Senior Curator, Research Programmes and Publications at Tate, in which I discuss my experience of working as a Black guide and developing the African Heritage Tours at the museum. This interview indicates how my practice-based research – as an art historian working directly with paintings and their interpretation in a gallery context – has informed my deep scholarly engagement with the subject of whiteness in the museum. The interview is followed by three short essays on paintings from the early modern period: Gheeraerts’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, The Cholmondeley Ladies and Gheeraerts’s Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee. Through close visual analysis, the essays explore the ways in which whiteness is constructed in the paintings – through skin tone, dress, make-up and heraldic symbolism – and situate this whiteness within the broader socio-historical contexts from which the paintings emerged. Each of these essays is prefaced by a short audio discussion with professional make-up artist Louise Constad in which we discuss the making and meaning of whiteness in the paintings. Finally, each essay concludes with the current wall caption for the work and a proposed alternative caption that I have written in light of my research. Aware of the differing ways art history is told to and received by the public, I propose here a more speculative, reflective and inclusive discussion that reaches beyond the gallery walls and the confines of academic institutions.

Whiteness and Blackness in the Museum: Establishing the African Heritage Tours at Tate

In this interview, I discuss my work as a Black guide at Tate over the past twenty years and my experience of developing the first African Heritage Tours at the museum. I explain how these tours brought ideas of whiteness to visitors, often for the first time, and how this has helped plug gaps in the histories being told about works that Tate owns and displays. The interview was held in November 2022 and facilitated by Christopher Griffin. The discussion is a selection from a longer interview and the transcript for the audio has been edited for clarity.

Portrait of an Unknown Lady, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts II

Listen to a conversation about the painting with make-up artist Louise Constad:

Like a pearl raised from the dark depths of the sea, the pregnant figure in Marcus Gheeraerts’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady c.1595 (fig.1) emerges from an inky blackness. The sitter’s cosmetically whitened face is framed by a helmet of black hair, which emphasises the lustre of the pearls that dangle from her alabaster forehead and drip from her reddened ear lobes. She wears a choker of pearls and emeralds, and the whole is brought together with a sunburst ruff. The spectacle of whiteness continues with the woman’s pale hand, threaded suggestively through a rope of pearls lying protectively on her bump while cupping one of her translucent white breasts.

The cosmetically applied blue veins on the figure’s hands further emphasise the ideal of transparency, denoting a ‘blue bloodedness’ synonymous with racial purity. The term ‘blue blood’, emanating from the Spanish sangre azul, was originally adopted by the Spanish elite as a means of claiming familial pedigree, untainted by Moorish or Jewish blood. This picture serves as a visual exemplar of Toni Morrison’s observation of how ‘images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both the antidote for and a meditation on the shadow that is the companion to whiteness’.11 The ‘shadow’ is used here by Morrison to indicate a Black presence, either real or imagined. Gheeraerts seeks to challenge the presence of such a shadow through the visual language of whiteness, and yet is not quite able to hide the look of concern on the sitter’s face, despite her ability to meet the viewer’s gaze with a self-assured smile.12

Gheeraerts liked to paint portraits of noticeably pregnant aristocratic English women. Other examples include Portrait of a Woman in Red 1620 (Tate T03456), Anne Hale, Mrs Hoskins 1629 (private collection) and Anne, Lady Pope with her Children 1596 (National Portrait Gallery, London). This was a relatively unique proclivity within early modern European portrait painting, as observed by the cultural historian Marieke de Winkel,13 and one to which the art historian Karen Hearn has ascribed the term ‘pregnancy portraits’.14 Hearn has suggested a number of reasons for the popularity of such images, including as ‘visual evidence’ of anticipated dynastic succession and as an aide-mémoire for a husband whose wife may be lost to the ‘rough sea’ and ‘dangerous rocks’ of pregnancy and childbirth.15

While such motives might be applied to Gheeraerts’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, they do not account for the unique qualities of the portrait, in particular the racial significance of the figure’s skin. Both Hearn and the art historian Richard Cork describe her skin as fashionable, with Cork observing that ‘their blanched skin proved their pedigree’,16 without consideration of the constitutive political and social significance of fashion and material culture.17 I instead contend that the image makes visible what cultural historian Kim F. Hall observes are ‘proper gender relations shap[ing] the terms for describing proper colonial relations’.18

These ‘proper colonial relations’ are represented in the painting by Gheeraerts’s use of the visual language of dark and light and the racial symbolism of pearls, and his depiction of the maternal body and cosmeticised white skin to symbolise an unsullied white bloodline. As commodified as the pearls she wears, the woman in Gheeraerts’s portrait is presented to the viewer as a desired and devotional object. The painting was made to be seen privately, functioning like a miniature, a format of painting that was ‘to be viewed’, according to the master limner Nicholas Hilliard (c.1547–1619), ‘of necessity in the hand near to the eye’.19 In this instance, the portrait was probably commissioned by the sitter‘s husband.20 Designed to flatter and please him, the painting also functioned as a memorial portrait in the event of his wife’s death during labour.

Gheeraerts has created an image in which whiteness is synonymous with womanhood and nation-building. Here, the white woman’s body functions as an authorising aristocratic trope in both the domestic and global settings. As the art historian Erin Griffey notes of the period, ‘within the context of elite marriages, the bride’s complexion was widely scrutinised because beauty, health and fertility were all intrinsically connected’.21 The woman is dressed in a gown that is wreathed in pearls to accentuate her pregnant belly, presenting her as the guardian of an emerging aristocratic English identity. The early modern pregnant body, perceived through medical texts, iconography and oral tradition as a leaky, unpredictable and impressionable vessel, is tasked with protecting inheritance.22 In the revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13) by the playwright John Webster, the titular Duchess’s maternal body becomes a ‘super-body’ able to command authority. In her analysis of the play, the literary scholar and playwright Sid Ray observes that ‘if the mother was not pure, her body did become a kind of Trojan horse; it gestated another body that diluted, or worse, infiltrated aristocratic blood and authority’.23

Created in an age obsessed with genealogy and the delineation of bloodlines, Portrait of an Unknown Lady exists in opposition to the iconography surrounding Elizabeth I, which celebrates her non-reproductive, virginal purity, while simultaneously mirroring the queen’s protective maternal persona as ‘mother of [her] Contreye’.24 Gheeaerts’s sitter wears black and white, a colour scheme that was used to symbolise constancy and chastity in portraits of Elizabeth.25 This links Gheeaerts’s portrait not only to the power of the monarch but also to established visual allegories of imperialist pursuits, as seen in paintings of Elizabeth such as the Armada Portrait from c.1588 (unknown artist, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London) and the Ditchley Portrait from c.1592 (also by Gheeraerts; fig.2). These portraits symbolise sovereign power, imperial intentions and maternal protection. In the former, Elizabeth is depicted with her hand resting on a globe, pointing to the Americas, while in the latter she stands astride a map of England, her expansive skirts protectively sheltering large portions of the country.26 In alluding to this connection, Portrait of an Unknown Lady emphasises an English whiteness whose borders are in need of protection from the foreign.

The Unknown Lady’s fairness celebrates the continuation of English aristocratic whiteness through sexual reproduction. That such ideals had a universal appeal are evident in works such as William Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 1’ (1609):

The value of white progeny depicted in Portrait of an Unknown Lady is rendered unstable, however, by the ever-present threat of the foreign and Black, evident in the inky background from which the figure emerges.28 This is underlined through strategically placed dark objects such as the black cord suspended from the figure’s ruff and threaded through her pearls, and the contrast between the sitter’s white bodice and her open black gown. Such contrasts between light and dark in the painting evoke the popular fear of maternal imagination: the belief that a pregnant woman’s thoughts and visions can cause harm to her unborn child. The French humanist writer Pierre Boaistuau (c.1517–66) records how such a view allowed the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates to save the honour of a woman accused of adultery:

Such concerns for besmudged bloodlines are further suggested, however obliquely, by the Unknown Lady’s breasts and the potential threat that wet nurses ‘of strange nation’ posed ‘lest she should give [the baby] strange or unseemly manners unfit or disagreeable to the customes and conditions of the house or citie wherein it is borne, and wherein it is to live’.30

Previous interpretations of Gheeraerts’s painting have identified the woman’s pearls as an indicator of purity and the hoped-for protective powers of Margaret of Antioch, the patron saint of pregnancy.31 However, this fails to fully account for the significance of pearls in early modern society. As objects of colonial exploitation and symbols of maritime power, they enunciate English nationalist interests in – and the possible wealth to be extracted from – the New World. In addition, they reference England’s increasing might over Spain and its dominions. Until the early fifteenth century, most pearls originated from the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Mannar. It was during the course of Christopher Columbus’s third voyage to the Americas in 1498 that he realised that pearls could be fished off the coast of what is now Venezuela. The harsh realities of Spanish-run pearl fisheries brought an inevitable depletion of indigenous divers, who were soon replaced by enslaved men from the west coast of Africa.32 The partially crown-sponsored and opportunistic endeavours of Elizabethan enslavers such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake, and the more orderly and enduring policy of colonisation under James I – including the successful settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, by the Virginia Company in 1607 – were further attempts to undermine Spain’s increasing control of the New World. To the alarm of Spanish officials, the Virginia Company now set their sights on the settlement of Bermuda, following an English shipwreck on the island in 1609, and buoyed by the promise of more pearl wealth.

The pearl’s continued evocation of faraway, exotic markets and England’s expanding maritime empire are featured in another portrait by Gheeraerts. Painted in 1591, a few years earlier than the Unknown Lady, the artist’s portrait of Francis Drake (fig.3) unambiguously links the possession of Africa, which is displayed on the globe, with the Drake Jewel c.1580–90 (fig.4) that the sitter wears around his waist. The Drake Jewel was a gift from Elizabeth I and consists of a miniature portrait of Elizabeth embedded in a ruby-encrusted pendant from which hangs a drop pearl. Its cover is decorated with a Black male bust wearing a Roman-style cape that is superimposed on a white female bust.

No written account on the nature and origins of pearls held more importance to the early modern European than Natural History, an encyclopaedic work by the first century Roman soldier and writer Pliny the Elder dating from around 77 AD. Intended for popular use, it covered a vast array of subjects including astronomy, archaeology, the arts and reproduction, and satisfied the Elizabethans’ continued fascination with Roman history. Linking pearls with the fragility of life and reproduction, and perplexed by the allure of pearls despite the danger inherent in diving for them, Pliny enquired, ‘Do we get most bodily pleasure from luxuries that cost human life?’33 Pearls were perceived as an essentially female jewel, while the oyster shell and flesh were thought to resemble female genitals. According to Pliny, oysters, ‘when stimulated by the season for procreation … open up, as it were, and are impregnated with dew, so the story goes … Then theses pregnant shells give birth and their off springs are pearls of quality corresponding to the quality of the dew they have received.’34

Used by early modern artists as a visual representation of luminosity and lustre, pearls were associated with radiance and birth. They were thought to possess an inherent beauty that required no correction in order to catch light – a natural flawless brilliance that, according to historian Molly Warsh, did not have ‘any need for manual artifice’.35 The figure of the Unknown Lady is similarly displayed as an exemplar of shimmering beauty that requires no alteration. Yet through her use of white cosmetics, which is understood by cultural historian Kim Poitevin as the performance of race through the use of ‘whiteface’,36 Gheeraerts introduces an uncertain superiority and perfection in need of the ‘manual artifice’ of make-up. The use of cosmetics also invokes the threat of contamination by the foreign and strange since make-up at the time would have consisted of ingredients sourced from around the world, such as ivory, coral, cochineal and pearls. Increased contact with such foreign commodities and people produced, according to literary scholar Ania Loomba, a ‘growing obsession with defining a white English self’.37

Through her display of pearls and cosmetics, the Unknown Lady’s reproductive body underwrites the brutality and violence of Atlantic enslavement. Her flawless white hand is both protective and indicative of the value and worth of her pregnant body. Her white body is a proclamation of family ties, which in turn produces a chaste and legitimate progeny – a child who is able, due to the mother’s status as a free white woman and wife, to inherit his or her father’s wealth. This is in contrast to enslaved Black women, whose progeny followed them into bondage.

Britain’s early modern enslaving practices have remained contested by some historians, although these scholars also invariably cite the royal backing of joint stock companies such as the Royal African Company in the mid- to late seventeenth century as early markers of Atlantic slavery.38 Ronald Pollitt goes so far as to describe England’s slaving and joint stock practices as ‘accomplishing to mingle the merchant and official classes in a profit-orienting melting pot’.39 Scholars such as Urvashi Chakravarty and Michael Guasco have broadened the subject to include discussions of how ideologies and discourses of slavery were fashioned and sustained in early modern England.40 Jennifer L. Morgan gives an account of how Francis Drake captured an enslaved woman called Maria and an unnamed man from a Spanish ship during his 1577 circumnavigation of the world. On discovering Maria’s pregnancy, Drake abandoned her, together with two men, on a deserted Indonesian island ‘to found a settlement’ using ‘racialised notions of inheritance to support a property claim for the Crown’.41 Maria’s status was transformed from sexual object ‘to a commodified place-marker on the map of Drake’s colonial ambitions’.42 Her reproductive function, and the reproductive function of future enslaved women, can be understood as reproductive labour. The value and worth of their pregnant bodies is embedded in racial heritability, predicated on the belief, using the language of animal husbandry and property rights, that ‘the mother’s owner also owns her child, just as the sheep’s owner also owns the land’. Partus sequitor ventrem – ‘offspring follows belly’.43 Notions of motherhood, family and kin, meanwhile, remained the preserve of free white women.

In the Ditchley and Armada portraits sovereignty and conquest are conflated in the iridescent figure of Elizabeth I, who stands upon a globe in the former, and extends an imperialist hand across a globe in the latter. By comparison, in the Portrait of an Unknown Lady, the sitter’s pregnant body adopts the place of the globe both compositionally and metaphorically, tethering ownership of the female body to imperialist tropes denoting discovery and possession. Gheeraerts’s fecund figure, her belly bursting with the promise of a rightful heir that is able to prolong her noble race, follows a long history of presenting the female body as the personification of land and territory awaiting penetration and ravage by the male adventurer. This is illustrated by English statesman and writer Walter Raleigh’s (1552–1618) famous proclamation that ‘Guiana is a Countrey that have yet her maydenhead never Sackt, turned, nor wrought … the graves have not bene opened for golde, the mines not broken with sledges’, and openly asserted by Virginia Company tracts that designated the New England coast as a virginal landscape, ‘her treasures having never yet been opened, nor her originals is wasted, consumed or abused’.44

Karen Hearn has described as paradoxical the phenomenon of early modern pregnancy portraits at a moment in English history when the likelihood of Elizabeth I becoming a mother was extremely slim.45 Yet it is arguably because of, not in spite of, Elizabeth’s lack of progeny and its consequences that Gheeraerts created pregnancy portraits such as that of the Unknown Lady. The painting demonstrates the sitter’s ability to reproduce in place of the queen, and to carry on her and her husband‘s bloodline where the queen cannot. Using miniature-like intimacy to depict the maternal, pearlised body of the Unknown Lady, Gheeraerts created a portrait that projected burgeoning notions of English nationhood, inheritance, aristocratic whiteness and fear of the foreign, while offering visual reassurances of the husband’s investments, including his pregnant wife.

Captions: Portrait of an Unknown Lady, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts II

Current caption
This portrait depicts a pregnant woman. Before modern science and medicine, pregnancy was dangerous, and women often died in childbirth. Yet, producing an heir to an elite family was considered an important duty of a wife. This painting celebrates the woman’s role in continuing her husband’s family line. We don’t know the identity of the sitter, but her elaborate clothing demonstrates she was wealthy and of high status. The pearls are symbols of moral purity, as monogamy for women in this period was imperative. She smiles, unusual in portraits of this time.

Alternative caption
This painting depicts a smiling, pregnant woman. Cosmetics would have been used to enhance the whiteness of her skin, mirroring the luminous white and red colours associated with Queen Elizabeth I. This gendered, aristocratic whiteness represented ideal beauty and English national identity. The portrait was likely commissioned by the sitter’s husband to commemorate his paternity and the purity of his white bloodline. The woman’s maternal body is dressed in pearls and her cosmetics would have contained imported ingredients. This may represent maritime prowess and colonial expansionism, as well as the fear of penetration from the foreign.

The Cholmondeley Ladies, unknown artist, Britain

Listen to a conversation about the painting with make-up artist Louise Constad:

Nothing quite prepares you for The Cholmondeley Ladies c.1600–10 (fig.5). The viewer is presented with a darkly painted rectangular panel on which two nearly identical, pale-skinned aristocratic women are depicted sitting upright in a large bed. Each holds a baby and gazes steadily out at the viewer. Their expressions, together with those of their babies, are the most naturalistic feature of the work: the women are quietly confident, with a barely discernible hint of concern.46 In comparison to their décolletage and hands, the sitters’ vivid faces appear cosmetically enhanced, displaying a subtle hint of a blush. Possibly whitened using Venetian ceruse, a lead-based compound, and reddened using cochineal, which is made from crushed South American beetles,47 their faces are further defined by heads of dark hair. With pale white hands, each figure presents her baby to the viewer. The babies are swaddled in red christening gowns and look skywards, their eye colour corresponding to the grey and brown eye colouring of their respective mothers. Aside from the crimson christening gowns, the only other deviation from the limited colour palette is a brownish-red coverlet with pinkish-brown flecks. An inscription is written in gold paint at the bottom left-hand corner. Described by Karen Hearn as ‘our key piece of evidence’, it reads, ‘Two Ladies of the Cholmondeley Family, Who were born the same day, Married the same day, and brought to bed [gave birth] the same day’.48

The identity of the sitters remains unknown, but it is possible they are the daughters or nieces of Sir Hugh and Lady Mary Cholmondeley, well-documented members of a long line of Cholmondeleys based in Cheshire since the sixteenth century.49 The portrait is thought to have been commissioned by Lady Mary, whom James I referred to as ‘the bold Lady of Cheshire’ on account of her independent and tenacious spirit.50 The Cholmondeley Ladies might reasonably be described as a female-centric image, embracing what Erasmus termed ‘The New Mother’51 – the title of a colloqui he wrote in praise of women’s domestic and maternal achievements, the educating of women and the state of celibacy as preferable to marriage. Yet the authority of the sitters rests on the irrefutable fact that they have borne children, which is further reinforced by the near-identical nature of the women, suggesting the continuity of their bloodline.

While there are early modern examples of near-identical sitters – such as Marcus Gheeraerts I’s Maids of Morton 1566 (private collection), a portrait of Dorothy and Penelope Devereux painted in 1581 by an unknown artist (Longleat House, Longleat), and an early seventeenth-century painting of two women, probably Anne of Denmark and her sister Elizabeth, wearing strings of pearls diagonally positioned across their torsos (private collection)52 – the composition seen in The Cholmondeley Ladies is considered unique in British painting of the period. The portrait is described by the art historian Robert Tittler as a ‘distinctively stark and enigmatic’ example of the family group portraits that were fashionable at the time of its production.53 Hearn, meanwhile, claims the work to be ‘full of mysteries, full of puzzles’.54 The striking likeness of the two women, which diminishes on closer scrutiny, has remained something of a smokescreen, perhaps preventing deeper analysis of the work. Although the artist remains unknown, Tittler and Hearn have argued convincingly that the image is the work of a herald with sufficient skill to paint portraits, or alternatively a herald painter, or the work of painter-stainers familiar with armorial painterly conventions due to taking on short-term commissions as deputised officials.55

Heralds, as members of the College of Arms, were entrusted with endorsing the legitimacy of existing arms, together with the inspection and adjudication of new requests. In his definitive guide to heraldry titled The Academy of Armoire (1688), the herald painter and genealogist Randle Holme describes a herald painter as an individual who ‘Paints Coats of Armes on Escochions, Shields, Tables, Penons, Standards and such like’.56 A more expansive understanding of The Cholmondeley Ladies is possible by treating the figures as representatives of an armigerous family – a family entitled to bear heraldic arms – who were living at a time when, according to historian Lawrence Stone,

The ideal of early modern aristocratic whiteness was an important element in the social legitimation of elite families, and this remained the case well into the nineteenth century.58 Female members of the gentry were perceived as both signifier of and vanguard in this act of legitimation: constituted by whiteness, according to Urvashi Chakravarty, ‘womanhood is intrinsically white, and gender is delimited by race, in early modern England as now’.59 Literary historian Dympna Callaghan has argued that the use of cosmetics to impersonate women on the early modern stage unmasks ‘the pivotal role of white femininity in the cultural production of race’.60 More icon than portraiture, and therefore less concerned with conveying the personalities and subjectivities of the sitters, The Cholmondeley Ladies functions as a heraldic shield.61 It is a visual blazon created to make known, at a mere glance, the virtues of a well-established, white, elite family tasked with asserting their civic standing and descent from antiquity.62 Compositionally, the shield was the most important feature of heraldic devices. It displayed geometric quarterings and divisions on which were arranged a series of shapes known as ‘charges’, and ‘furs’, commonly in the form of ermine and vair, were a mark of dignity, and were represented by black shapes replicating fur.

Tittler’s argument that The Cholmondeley Ladies was likely painted by a local herald or by painter-stainers is based on his account of the ways in which the work follows heraldic painterly conventions, for example in its simplified style and use of a limited range of colours that are chosen for their symbolic significance.63 He omits, however, any discussion of emergent early modern notions of aristocratic whiteness and race. My argument is that heraldic conventions are employed in this portrait to enunciate aristocratic whiteness, by emphasising the legitimation and succession of the Cholmondeley family estate, paternity and bloodline. In addition, the presence of vernacular images like The Cholmondeley Ladies – works that lacked the sophisticated painterly ideals of perspective, subtle gestures and blended colours of European court artists such as Hans Eworth and Paul van Somer – were motivated by a desire to define status and familial standing. This desire is linked to the emergence of an increasingly mobile merchant class and noble elite in England at the time. Unlike their French and Spanish contemporaries, these families invested heavily in joint stock companies such as the East India Company, shaping England’s trade and expansionist advancements and its future colonial rule. Tittler contends that the prevalence of heraldic motifs in English portraiture ‘owe[s] more to the social context in which those portraits were commissioned than to any other factor’, going on to highlight the ‘unprecedented opportunities to acquire land and office’ that were available at the time.64 Yet there is no acknowledgment by Tittler of the growing aristocratic involvement in joint stock companies, and desire to profit from, in particular, Portuguese monopolies,65 which is an important aspect of the social context in which these portraits were commissioned.

Described by Tittler as a complex and widely understood ‘symbolic language’, colour was central to heraldic traditions.66 Popular early modern heraldic texts such as John Bossewell’s Works of Armorie (1572) and Gerard Legh’s Accedens of Armory (1562) offered a detailed system of heraldic conventions in which colours are imbued with symbolic and moral meaning. It consisted of five ‘traditional colours’ or ‘tinctures’: black or ‘sable’ represented prudence and wisdom; green or ‘vert’ signalled abundance and hope; red or ‘gules’ symbolised sacrifice and blood; blue or ‘azure’ indicated chastity and loyalty; and purple or ‘purpure’ was associated with royalty and sovereignty. In addition to the five colours, there are two ‘metals’: gold, referred to as ‘or’, denoting yellow, and silver, or ‘argent’, representing white.67 Describing the heraldic representation of argent/white, Legh writes that ‘simplie of it self, [it] signifieth to the bearer thereof Chastitie, virginitie, cleare conscience & Charitie.’68

The colour symbolism of heraldic forms reflected the Elizabethan interest in the hierarchal qualities of colour. Henry Peacham’s book of etiquette, The Compleat Gentleman (1661), devotes two chapters to heraldic arms. The coat of arms of the Earl of Derby is described as ‘bearing Argent [white], on Band Azure [blue], 3 Bucks head Cabosed Or [gold]’, and as being a reflection of his ‘virtue, courage, wisdom and loyalty’.69 Much like the need for the distinctive features of heraldic devices to be seen from a distance, the ‘pure’, undiluted, flag-like display of white skin colour on the figures in The Cholmondeley Ladies and their babies, together with their red lips, pink cheeks and pearl necklaces, creates an ordered appearance that aids the viewer’s understanding of the work. The heraldic schema, with its pure colours, flat, static surface, and geometrical quartering of the composition through the position of the two women and the two babies – sectioned like a heraldic shield – lends the work a feeling of symmetry and commensurability.70 The portrait in this way combines Elizabethan ideals of feminine beauty with beliefs in the status and ranking of colour as related to heraldry.71

Overlooking any reference to race in The Cholmondeley Ladies, Tittler discusses the use of white as ‘true to heraldic painting in general’ and as ‘standing for cleanliness, purity, and joy’. Consequently, when he describes the sitter’s skin, it is as ‘flesh’, and as a further example of the naive style and provincial status of the painting, where ‘flesh is modelled, to the extent it is modelled at all, in a flat monotone’.72 Despite the fact that heraldic conventions prohibited the layering of the two ‘metals’ over each other, the unknown artist nonetheless chooses to layer argent upon argent, white on white. The bodies of the sitters are supported by a receding pile of white pillows; they are clothed in silver-white gowns, with schematically rendered cannon sleeves that, like their ruffs, are edged in lace. In this they resemble Imogen in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1611), whom Iachimo affirms ‘becomest thy bed! fresh lily! And whiter than sheets!’.73

The blanched bodies of the sitters are effectively enhanced by the dark background, drawing the viewer’s attention to the transparency of their skin.74 With the obvious use of outlining – another feature of heraldic conventions – their faces are framed and illuminated by the enormous fan-shaped ruffs that radiate a white iridescence suggestive of their status and rank: the two women are presented to the viewer like precious gems on a white pillow. This reflects the early modern lyrical and dramatic tradition of comparing women with jewels. In his ode to his bride, Epithalamion (1595), Edmund Spenser likens her facial features to ‘eyes like sapphires shining bright, her forehead ivory white.’75 Similarly, Iachimo compares Imogen’s lips to ‘rubies unparagon’d’.76 Both of the Cholmondeley ladies wear pearls around their necks. As we have seen in the discussion of Gheeraerts’s Portrait of an Unknown Lady, pearls signified virtue, purity and mercantile imperialism. In addition, the pearls act as a visual synecdoche for each figure’s pearl-like skin, reiterating their fairness and worth.77

While Tittler recognises the visual prominence of hands in portraits like The Cholmondeley Ladies, his analysis is limited to speculating on how the ‘size, position, flesh tones, and potential gesture and expression’ of the hands might act as a distraction from the subjects’ faces.78 Yet the hands of both mothers are noticeably white and slender, an indicator of their maternal virtue as well as their membership of the elite. This reflects another recognisable use of heraldic chromatic conventions where the application of white/silver is used to denote a leisured class that is inherently unsuited to manual work and therefore worthy of armorial display.79 Like the face, hands signified a racial whiteness synonymous with idealised beauty. In Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), the narrator describes Hero’s beauty as follows:

Hero’s beauty is sustained by an unalterable and indelible whiteness, that ‘neither sun nor wind/Would burn or parch’.

During the early modern period, race was understood as denoting a myriad of familial identities and inherited titles, as well as class status, nationhood, religion and colour. It also denoted bloodlines, nobility and genealogy.81 The manner in which race in the early modern period converges with issues of English nationalism, racialised whiteness and Black subjection is evidenced by the endowment in 1565 of a coat of arms to the privateer John Hawkins, England’s first recognised enslaver (fig.6). The design features an enslaved Black person who is clearly visible on the crest; the inscription describes the figure as a ‘Demy moore in his proper culler bound in cord as bonde & captive with annulets on his armes and ears’.82 The image makes the captivity of Africans highly permissible, shaping an evolving English nationalism defined by imperialist ideals that entered the public domain, according to Urvashi Chakravarty, via the elite school classroom and the humanist curriculum.83 This was a curriculum best suited to the potential male offspring of the Cholmondeley ladies, and one that included an essential familiarity with heraldic conventions, as demonstrated by Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman.

It is of note that one of the many heraldic devices featured in Peacham’s volume includes the coat of arms of William Juxon, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1660 until his death in 1663 (fig.7).84 In addition to his ecclesiastical office, Juxon was entrusted with a number of secular duties that included Lord High Treasurer of England and First Lord of the Admiralty, all of which afforded him the opportunity to forge links with the English Atlantic trade. According to Peacham, Juxon’s heraldic shield consists of ‘Argent, a plain Crosse Sable, between Four Moores Heads coupe at the shoulders proper’.85 This was an armorial device that appears to acknowledge, with the use of recognisable status-enhancing motifs such as that of the ‘four Moores’, Juxon’s secular as well as his sacred accolades. In more emphatic terms, art historians Jean Devisse and Michel Mollat contend that ‘Unquestionably, black colour was a symbol, and the black man became a symbol. Under both aspects – man and colour – black was inserted in heraldry following ranked, individualised, codified order’.86

As members of the College of Arms, heralds were required to remain in contact with arms-bearing families. Such families came with knighthoods or peerages, or were members of the merchant and middling classes who, lacking an inherited title, pursued their armigerous ambitions by acquiring the status of gentlemen. The ideal of gentility was so intrinsically woven into the acquisition of coats of arms that the contemporary definition of a gentleman was one who bears arms, and who was thought of as a ‘graunt of noblesse’ (granted nobility) as evidenced by appearance, behaviour and bearing. The humanist scholar and colonialist Thomas Smith (1512–1577), while observing that ‘gentlemen … be made cheape in England’,87 defined them as men who were able, through their blood and race, to ‘make noble and known’. In addition:

The unwarranted display of arms required the heralds to attend weddings and funerals and to conduct visitations, where they vetted new requests by aspiring families to bear arms. They held the authority to allow new families to join the ranks of the privileged, but such powers were not always welcomed. Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton (1540–1614), accused heralds of bringing about ‘infection’ and a ‘kind of leprosies’ by ‘clearing’ the ‘base blood’ of the noble.89 Howard insinuates that in legitimising the acquisition of property and wealth over the material fact of noble blood and its unalterable lineage, heralds were contaminating the body politic, making it vulnerable to future disease and decay. Moreover, it is important to note that Howard’s fear of ‘infection’ is a reference to Black skin, an allusion propagated by the English voyager George Best (1555–1584) when he states that ‘this blackness proceedeth of some natural infection’.90

Despite the institutional conflicts between heralds and painter-stainers, a combination of skill deficit (not all heralds possessed the requisite expertise to complete a commission) and an increased workload required the heralds to call on the assistance of painter-stainers and other allied craftsmen, such as arms painters. These instances of collaborative working were very different to the jurisdictional clashes between painter-stainers and those they perceived as foreign interlopers: continental court painters who were forbidden to become members of the Company of Painter-Stainers.91 There is evidence that underlying this was concern on the part of painter-stainers over the erosion of English identity and representation. In their study of early modern material culture and portraiture, cultural historians Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass capture the essence of such anxieties by asking:

The role of painter-stainers in determining genealogies and the related significance given to skin colour is alluded to by physician and natural philosopher John Bulwer, who in his Anthropometamorphosis (1653) invoked the language of descent. Comparing the cosmetic traditions of the English with women from other parts of the world, he notes:

Kim Poitevin observes how in his condemnation of women’s use of cosmetics, Bulwer conflates bodily markings with racial lineage, comparing the cosmetic practices of other parts of the world – ‘streaks and markes’ – with the English woman’s use of make-up, an intrinsically racialising act. Indeed, he regards ‘our Face-taking race’ as one that is descended from painter-stainers, obliquely hinting at women’s role as the preservers of English succession.94

In addition to Poitevin’s illuminating observations, Bulwer’s text, with its conflation of painter-stainers with descendancy, reveals how the language of heraldry and blazons, such as ‘tincture’, ‘stain’, ‘colours’ and ‘difference’ (the use of small distinguishing signs to enable an heir to bear his ancestral arms while his father was still alive), is able to conjoin gender with racial whiteness. The blazon as a medium by which to convey female beauty, via detailed descriptions of its constituent parts,95 commonly used the lily – seen earlier in Iachimo’s account of Imogen’s skin – and the rose. These are both prominent heraldic flowers, used as the armorial language for red and white – the symbols of beauty. Constructed as a visual blazon, the faces, décolletages and hands of The Cholmondeley Ladies mirror the blazoned language of the narrator in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594) who, acknowledging ‘This heraldry in Lucrece’ face was seen’,96 describes the red and white in her cheeks as ‘this silent war of lilies and of roses’,97 ‘Which Tarquin view’d in her fair face’s field’ and ‘her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under’.98

The Cholmondeley Ladies is compositionally unique in its use of a bed in a seventeenth-century British painting displaying motherhood; the pose adopted by the figures was more common to tomb sculpture. The viewer is unusually privy to the early modern motif of maternal and distaff secrecy: the lying-in-childbed, a communal ritual where, before and after the birth of the child, the mother would be confined to a warm, dark room, assisted by a midwife and gossips consisting of trusted female friends and neighbours.99 Even on the Renaissance stage, where childbirth was a popular theme, this ritual never took place in full view of the audience.100 Opening up this midwife-led, hermetically sealed chamber – enclosed by curtains and with doors shut and keyholes stopped – to patriarchal scrutiny may have reflected concerns regarding paternity and inheritance.101 Men were never completely confident of their patriliny, the most reliable measure being a discernible resemblance between father and child,102 based on the early modern medical theory that a child’s physical characteristics originated from the male seed.103 In a popular contemporary anecdote, George Best states that ‘I my self have seene an Ethiopian as blacke as a cole brought into England, who taking a faire English woman to wife, begat a sonne in all respects as blacke as the father was, although England were his native countrey, and an English woman his mother’.104 According to literary historian Lynda Boose this anecdote indicates that there were suppressed fears among the white English patriarchy about the power of Blackness to eclipse whiteness.105 Such uncertainties were further exacerbated by what historian David Underwood has called a ‘crisis of gender’ involving a gradual erosion of masculine authority.106

The conjoining of the heraldic with the lying-in-childbed in The Cholmondeley Ladies highlights the importance of heralds and midwives as custodians of family pedigree and English purity. Tasked with maintaining ‘the noble scions of true noble houses’,107 according to Henry Howard, heralds and midwives were both expected to exercise discretion. The former did this by ‘keep[ing] the seacrettes of knights, Esquires, Ladyes, and gentlemen as a confessor of Arms and to discover [disclose] them in noe wise except to be treason’;108 the latter by keeping ‘women’s matters and smock Secrets’ and validating the mother’s truth concerning the paternity of her child.109 In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1588–93), Empress Tamora, ‘the fairest breeder of them all’,110 is determined to maintain the veneer of legitimacy and of the white bloodline, and therefore sends her lying-in maid to present her baby to his father Aaron, ‘the Moor’, with the instruction that he ‘christen it with thy dagger’s point’.111 Aaron, in turn, expresses both concern and relief when ‘The midwife and nurse well-made away, Then let the ladies tattle what they please’.112

Such uneasiness is connected with late Tudor and early Stuart interest in the Atlantic trade, in particular the development of joint stock companies and the involvement of the aristocratic elite.113 This raised a number of converging concerns that included domestic anxieties over male and female relations, and the loss of English identity due to political and economic links with distant nations. Citing the work of sociologists Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis, Kim F. Hall suggests that such tensions were worked through using representations of women as ‘signifiers of ethnic/national differences’ and as the bulwark of the English nation.114 The Cholmondeley ladies display their naturally uncontrollable bodies – an idea sustained by the early modern belief that women’s bodies were moister than mens – that are containers for an unpredictable array of liquids, such as breastmilk, menstrual blood and tears, made all the more unruly by wombs that appear animate and open to foreign infiltration due to their recent births.115 In this way, they compromise their symbolic role as guardians of a white English nation.116 Yet they retrieve their function as ‘boundary markers of imperialism’ by proclaiming, in duplicate, their maternal authority as wives and mothers.117 This was a reversal of the virginal role of the mother of the nation, Elizabeth I, whose sexual inexperience bestowed her with power and dominance.118 By contrast, the Cholmondeley women’s blatant display of sexual experience is what gives them authority, buoyed by the responsibility for aristocratic white succession through reproduction. The sonnet cycle Zepheria, written by an anonymous Elizabethan in 1594, reflects such sentiments perfectly:

By implication, the begetting of babies by ‘fair ladies’, such as the sitters for The Cholmondeley Ladies, is the nationalistic thing to do. The babies also play an important symbolic and heraldic role in the painting. They lie on a heraldically inspired sanguine coloured blanket that displays pinkish-brown flecks that might be described as ‘furs’. The placement of the infants diagonally across their mothers’ wombs is suggestive both of the positioning of heraldic ‘charges’ and a sense of somatic oneness with their mothers that consolidates their identities as elite women, with the babies’ pedigree emerging from their containment within their mothers’ bodies.

The women in The Cholmondeley Ladies, through their layers of whiteness and their babies in their flowing christening robes, symbolise the continuity and legitimacy of their ‘pure’ white race and unsullied bloodlines. Presented in the form of a heraldic shield, their unquestionable prerogative as members of the aristocratic elite is endorsed by the Crown, whose figurehead was the now fading Elizabeth I, her virginal and chaste powers superseded by displays of progeny and nation-building. While histories of the painting to date have largely placed The Cholmondeley Ladies in a historical vacuum, it is clear that England’s expansionist and colonialist ambitions are of significance to the painting’s construction. It illustrates men’s desire to secure rights of aristocracy, ascendancy and inheritance. Buttressed by contemporary discourses of white supremacy, such desire, from men of both emergent and hereditary aristocracy, can be seen as a key driver in the African slave trade.

Captions: The Cholmondeley Ladies, unknown artist, Britain

Current caption
According to the inscription (bottom left), this painting shows ‘Two Ladies of the Cholmondeley Family, Who were born the same day, Married the same day, And brought to Bed [gave birth] the same day’. To mark this dynastic event, they are formally presented in bed, their babies wrapped in scarlet fabric. Identical at a superficial glance, the lace, jewellery and eye colours of the ladies and infants are in fact carefully differentiated. The format echoes tomb sculpture of the period. The identity of the women is unclear.

Alternative caption
The bigger the ruff the more space to occupy, the more authority to wield, and the more certain the claims of your pedigree. Pictured in white on white and emerging from a dark background like a heraldic shield, the ladies present their white, English bloodlines, not once but twice. Unreservedly unvirginal, yet chaste through the power of marriage, motherhood and perfected beauty, they present a carbon copy of themselves through the begetting of children. Each infant is strategically placed across each respective womb. Their christening gowns suggest a crimson flow of pure blood.

Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee, Marcus Gheeraerts II

Listen to a conversation about the painting with make-up artist Louise Constad:

The Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee 1594 by Marcus Gheeraerts II (fig.8) is a startling portrait of a semi-clothed man standing in a rugged landscape. Armed with a shield, sword, javelin and pistol, and carrying a helmet, the figure’s top half consists of an elaborately laced shirt, combed hair and trimmed beard, his bottom half displaying bare legs and soiled bare feet.

Interpretations of Gheeraerts’s painting have drawn out the representation of Lee’s Anglo-Irish identity, the political intent of the portrait and Lee’s overtly sexual display.120 There has been little analysis, however, of the image in relation to the evolution of early modern aristocratic racial whiteness. This is surprising given the many references to Elizabethan expansionist and imperialist interests contained within the portrait. In addition, the established trope of Blackness as a signifier of sin and evil was applied not only to dark-skinned Africans, but also to Indigenous Americans, Indian, Spanish and Welsh people, and the ‘barbarous Irish’.121

Lee was born in England in 1551/2 and was part of the English ‘conquest’ of Ireland.122 Arriving in the country in 1574, he was tasked with protecting the Pale, a part of the east coast of Ireland under English control, against raids from the native Irish. Lee quickly took command of his own company of foot soldiers and was an active force in the colonisation efforts of his second cousin Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex. He married an Irish Catholic widow, Elizabeth Peppard Eustace, thereby appropriating numerous estates in County Kildare. He aligned himself with many Irish chieftains, in particular Hugh O’Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, whom Lee describes in his handwritten treatise A Brief Declaration of the Government of Ireland (1594) as ‘being often his bedfellow’.123 While opinions of Lee differed, he received a number of verbal commendations. In 1582 the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop Adam Loftus described Lee to Sir Francis Walsingham, one the queen’s principal secretaries of state, as ‘a valiant man … [who has] done more good service than any one captain in this land.’124 In October 1593 he was again recommended for valiant displays of bravery and valour by the Lord Deputy, John Perrot, at the Battle at Erne ford near Beleek. Describing him as the roughest of diamonds, the historian Hiram Morgan lists his various roles as ‘a soldier, marauder, squatter, debtor, poseur, pamphleteer, mediator, conspirator and jailbird’.125 In short, Lee was ‘That most effective of Elizabeth’s policemen’, according to cultural historian Ian Leask.126

Lee is presented standing in the lee (or shelter) of an oak tree, a visual pun on the family name, whose motto was fide et constantia, ‘faith and constancy’. In positioning the sitter in this way, Gheeraerts is able with some economy to express Lee’s loyalty to the queen and to England, and to reference his familial roots, or more particularly, his cousin Henry Lee (1533–1611). Henry commissioned the portrait in 1594 and was the queen’s Champion of the Tilts and organiser of the annual Accession Day Tilts at Whitehall.127 The sitter has an exposed chest and bare legs and feet, while his gilded leather vest and wooden javelin are related to the attire of an Irish foot soldier or ‘kern’.128 These individuals were referred to by engraver and writer John Derricke as the ‘wilde men in Ireland, properly called wood-kern’,129 whose clothing he describes as consisting of ‘shirtes be verie straunge, not reaching paste the thie: with pleates on pleates thei pleated are, as thick as pleats maie lye’.130

This apparel is in stark contrast to Lee’s quintessentially English linen shirt, with its laced collar and cuffs and blackwork embroidery displaying Tudor roses. Morgan notes how the shirt is more suited to a masque or tilt.131 Art historian Lucy Gent describes the garment as ‘a lover’s shirt, a shirt fit for making courtly love, with the resonance of Petrarchan desire, and of the role playing involved in acting out Petrarchan scenarios’.132 The English origins of Lee’s attire and his status as a professional soldier are further enhanced by an abundance of European arms and armour. His left arm falls casually on the hilt and quillon of his sword. An inlaid snap haunch pistol hangs from his waist, a Spanish morion helmet rests in the crook of his left arm and a round shield hangs from his back. The portrait combines Lee’s personal interests, guided by the chivalric conventions of the pageant and masque, with the device of the wild man, a medieval stock figure who inhabits woods and forests. Covered in thick black hair or wearing a loin cloth and garland fashioned from foliage, the wild man holds a club or uprooted tree in his hands. Representing the antithesis of civility, his wildness could only be tamed by the subduing qualities of the queen’s virginity.133

Portrait painters of the Jacobean and Elizabethan age were often employed by their aristocratic sitters to complete portraits in which, dressed in the clothes of the colonised, the sitters demonstrated their familiarity with and possession of the foreign and distant.134 The literary historian Terry Castle, in her analysis of the carnivalesque in eighteenth-century English culture, notes how the pleasure of masquerade is predicated on the experience of doubleness: ‘the alienation of the inner from the outer, a fantasy of two bodies simultaneously and thrillingly present, self and other together, the two-in-one.’135 Similarly, in her study of colonialism and eighteenth-century art, the cultural historian Beth Fowkes Tobin suggests that an important motivating factor for donning non-English attire was the desire to wield ‘authority over the foreign by displaying alien practises on their bodies’.136 The literary historian Stephen Greenblatt explores this with respect to Anglo-Irish relations, observing the early modern trope of highlighting the contrast between English refinement and Irish crudity. In his analysis of anti-Irish sentiments underpinning Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–6), Greenblatt observes how ‘civility is won through the exercise of violence over what is deemed barbarous and evil, and the passages of love and leisure are not moments set apart from this process but its reward’.137 Bearing in mind Spenser’s appointment as secretary to the soldier and lord deputy of Ireland Arthur Grey in 1580, England’s colonial and civilising ambitions were pursued not only through brute force but by the moral and intellectual instruction of the poet.

Gheeraerts’s Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee might reasonably be understood as a visual gesture of Elizabethan power over the colonised Irish. As my analysis will show, the portrait, with its audacious display of Lee’s skin, is emblematic of an evolving notion of aristocratic whiteness. This was a whiteness that was synonymous with England, and was preserved through the many motifs associated with the ever-present cult of Elizabeth I, described by cultural historian Peter Erickson as ‘the cult of whiteness’.138

Thomas Lee was viewed with suspicion by many in England due to his close ties to prominent Irish rebels. In this portrait Lee was determined to use every metaphor at his disposal to create a visual apologia to refute accusations of treason and duplicity levelled against him for most of his military career.139 However, this attempt to seek forgiveness was unsuccessful. Lee’s support of the failed Essex Rebellion in 1601 – an attempt by Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, to gain further influence at court – culminated in Lee’s arrest. That same year, he was hung at Tyburn for treason.140

Like the bifurcated figure of Lee, top half courtly and refined, bottom half seemingly uncivilised and barbaric, the landscape setting appears divided: on the right is brightly lit, wild bogland, and on the left, barely discernible shadowy figures prowl beside an open stretch of water. Historian Brian de Breffny and others have understood this as referring to the 1593 Battle of Erne Fords where Lee distinguished himself.141 The Latin inscription above Lee’s right arm, facere et pati fortia, is a quotation from Livy’s History of Rome (27–9 BC). Translated as ‘to do and endure valiantly’,142 it was originally spoken by Gaius Mucius following a foiled attempt to assassinate the Etruscan leader Lars Porsena. In an act of courage, Mucius thrust his right hand into an altar fire. Impressed by such fortitude, Porsena established a lasting peace with Rome, and Mucius was granted lands by the senate.

Gheeraerts’s portrait of Lee presents an unabashed display of skin which includes the hide of his leather jerkin and the animal skin on his shield, with its hirsute finish. He sports a pale forehead in comparison with his ruddy face and red ear, which in turn contrasts with his pale chest, white left hand and ultra-white, marble-like bare legs. His whiteness is presented as material and instrumental in its service to Elizabeth as the arms he bears. His corporeal presence and exposed skin are displayed to the viewer as a mapping exercise,143 documenting his colonising and subduing efforts in Ireland in the name of the queen. Presented as a luminous force, akin to the many portraits of Elizabeth where she appears as the very source of light,144 Lee shines against the dark landscape. This visual effect reflects both the black and white colour scheme adopted by Elizabeth and the semantic and ideological connotations of black and white skin.

Gheeraerts’s handling of Lee’s skin is highly considered. His white forehead suggests he has worn his morion helmet in battle, despite Edmund Spenser’s assertion that one of the defining features of a kern was their propensity to enter battle ‘without armour on their bodies and head’.145 The helmet’s Spanish origins are also an allusion to Spain’s hybridity as a nation in constant contact with the ‘foreign’, and England’s hatred of the Spanish that was fuelled by an envy of Spain’s increasing control over foreign trade.146 England’s, and therefore Elizabeth’s, victory against the Spanish Armada is also implied by the inclusion of the helmet, which Gent observes ‘rests so suggestively beside the traditional position of the heart’.147 Lee’s ruddy, sunburned face, a reminder of the well-known proverb, ‘He that walks much in the sun will be tanned at last’,148 indicates how he hazards his body ‘abroade’, his white form assuming a fearless physical presence in a hostile Ireland at the behest of the queen.149

In presenting Lee under an oak tree, the portrait is part of a long iconographic tradition in which noblemen are shown standing or lying beneath oak trees – a symbol of England and Englishness – thus annunciating their allegiance to Elizabeth I or an unnamed love interest.150 Examples include Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portraits of George Clifford, 3rd Earl of Cumberland 1558–1605 c.1590 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London) and Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland c.1590–5 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), and Isaac Oliver’s portrait of Sir Edward Herbert, later 1st Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1581/2–1648) c.1613–14 (Powis Castle and Gardens, Powys). The tree also metaphorically protects the queen from the damaging rays of the sun. A poem from Zepheria reflects the similarly protective nature of trees and the preservation of a prized fairness: ‘she booths her fair with shade of broad-branched trees, wherein (good Queen) her care doth match her treasure’.151

Lee himself is self-fashioned as the embodiment of both civility and barbarism. While the starkness of his legs has few artistic comparisons from the early modern period,152 his hands would have been important signifiers of character, racial identity and status to contemporary viewers.153 They display a different tonal whiteness to his legs and face. Small and slender, they evoke many of the literary links made between white hands and the gentry, as seen in Portrait of an Unknown Lady and The Cholmondeley Ladies. In the prose romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621) by the poet Mary Wroth, the woodsman Mirasindo is described as having ‘hands most excellently faire’, an indicator of his class inheritance. Similarly, Queen Pamphilia identifies Amphilanthus by his hands: ‘his hands bare, she was soon assured who it was … he had hands of that delicacy for pure whiteness, delicate shape and softness.’154

Lee’s right hand holds a javelin, his index finger threaded through the object’s red throwing loop. This is reminiscent of a 1568 half-length portrait of Henry Lee by Anthonis Mor (National Portrait Gallery, London), where the thumb of the sitter’s left hand is jammed into a ring that is attached to a red cord suspended from his neck. It possibly refers to the gesture’s association with a courtier’s willingness to endure pain in exchange for Elizabeth’s sympathy and love.155 Lee’s left hand droops from the wrist, with two fingers suggestively resting on the barrel of his gun. Scholarly accounts of this hand link it to the Latin quotation and the aforementioned story of Mucius, who put his hand in the altar fire and was subsequently known as Scaevola, the left-handed one, on account of his damaged right hand.156 This creates a parallel between the Roman youth’s act of bravery and Lee’s desire to display his unfaltering loyalty while consorting with the Crown’s Irish adversaries. What this interpretation fails to acknowledge is the Elizabethan obsession with classical Rome, the elevation and restoration of classical antiquity and the way Latin texts were the inspiration for poets, politicians, playwrights and artists. According to literary historian Paulina Kewes, ‘Lessons of Roman history were a shaping influence on Elizabethan thinking on issues that were central to the age: among them the powers of monarchy, the succession to the throne, the properties of colonial expansion and empire, and the confessional clashes of Protestant and Catholic.’157

Gheeraerts’s portrait would have been incomplete without such romanesque flourishes, which are conveyed not only through the inclusion of Latin text and Lee’s toga-like attire, but with the way Lee’s left hand and, in particular, his legs are painted to resemble classical sculpture. As well as the visual language of purity and what Peter Stallybrass and literary theorist Allon White describe as the ‘discursive classical body’, in which was encoded ‘those regulated systems which were closed, homogeneous, monumental, centred and symmetrical’,158 the most identifiable feature of classical sculpture is its white marble form. Here this is used as a further endorsement of whiteness as the racialised ideal in matters of beauty, chivalry and the body: it is more than just a bravura turn, or ‘craft performance’, a term used by Gent to describe Gheeraerts’s varied displays of virtuosity and skill.159 Gheeraerts uses the moral heft of white marble to evoke an indisputable English racial whiteness that would be instantly recognised by the desired viewer: Elizabeth.160 Moreover, as Stallybrass notes, the classical body has no orifices.161 Lee’s classicised legs, and all that they represent, offer an effective defence against foreign penetration, and protection from its impact on English national identity due to colonial exploits and foreign trade. As observed by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his discussion of the grotesque and excess in the works of sixteenth-century writer François Rabelais, the antithesis of the grotesque is seen in ‘the opaque surface and the body’s “valleys” acquir[ing] an essential meaning as the border of an enclosed individuality that does not merge with other bodies and the world’.162

According to Gent, Lee’s legs are indecorous, ‘the shock of which never abates’.163 While not wishing to undermine Gent’s encounter with the portrait, the prominence of a shapely pair of courtly male legs would have been less shocking in the early modern period and therefore a less challenging aesthetic device. In an analysis of William Larkin’s George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham c.1616 (National Portrait Gallery, London), literary historian Giulia Mari describes the duke’s bare white legs as a not uncommon visual representation of early modern masculine beauty and virility.164 Gheeraerts, with Henry Lee’s guidance and courtly knowledge, has further inscribed a racial purity on Thomas Lee’s legs with the inclusion of blue veins, which are designed to appear as naturally occurring craquelure on marble.

The absence of silken hose on the legs, while a metonym for the uncivilised and uncouth Irish,165 is also another reference to white skin. While hoses were worn in many colours, white was always the preferred choice, and took on the veneer of a second skin.166 This functioned as a prosthetic not unlike the theatrical devices used by white male actors of the period to mimic Black skin, such as black masks and gloves made from leather and velvet.167 Ian Leask, in his analysis of the Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee, interprets the frills and lace of Lee’s costume as a further allusion, like the hoses, to the ‘braided, refined, civilised’ character of the English courtier.168 While I agree with his contention, it overlooks the way Lee’s laced collar and cuffs are another reference to his white skin and its racially moralising effect, one that is further enhanced by wearing the black and white colours of Elizabeth. Lace, with its characteristic transparency, both literally and metaphorically enables Lee’s skin to convey a deeper, naked truth, in keeping with his request for forgiveness from the queen for accusations of treason. This is particularly apparent on the cuff of his left sleeve, where the diaphanous qualities of the lace are linked with Scaevola’s open display of bravery, visualised in the form of Lee’s scarred hand.

Although Lee never achieved the Order of the Garter, his involvement in the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland is conveyed in this portrait as comparable to the exploits of St George – who features on the Garter emblem – and his defeat of the dragon in the name of a chaste white lady.169 Peter Erickson traces the racial associations in the medieval history of St George through Raphael’s St George and the Dragon c.1506 (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC) and the anonymous portrait from the 1580s–90s of Elizabeth I wearing the Lesser George medal (Royal Collection, Kensington Palace, London). He convincingly demonstrates an emerging early modern reference to whiteness as a protective force, in the form of St George’s white horse, and the racial connotations attached to the darker hues of the dominated and slain dragon. Such representations were prompted by the growing interest in international trade and global exploration, and underpinned by an unquestionable morally conquering force in the form of the queen, culminating, according to Erickson, with the ‘queen’s body politic … not only gendered but raced’.170 The garter, a buckled blue velvet strap that is traditionally worn on the left calf, is also obliquely, yet no less significantly, referenced in Gheeraerts’s portrait via the display of blue veins on Lee’s calves.171 A more noticeable tributary of these blue veins is presented on his left leg, where the garter would have been worn.172

Indisputably self-fashioning a wild and barbaric Irishness, like the epidermal distillation and objectification of Black Africans by white actors using soot and prosthetics, Lee’s untamed elements are never totally all-consuming. His body is protected by his seemingly more prominent white presentation. However, either unintentionally or by design, the unstable quality of whiteness is presented by Gheeraerts as a defacement, in the form of the blackened toes of Lee’s right foot. Commonly understood as another allusion to his appearance as an Irish kern, Lee’s besmirched toes, vulnerable in their outside setting, starkly contrast with his white legs. They present Blackness (and Irishness) as a threat to whiteness that is further reiterated by the dark patches of earth that surround his feet. Unsurprisingly, such anxieties are reflected in the poetic and theatrical productions of the age. For instance, the poet and diplomat Edward Herbert, in ‘Sonnet to Black Beauty’ (1665), celebrates the power of Blackness, and the obsolescence inherent in the poet’s glorification of brightness. He writes:

Herbert’s belief in a Black beauty whose ‘Power can no colours here renew’ is echoed by Aaron, ‘the Moor’, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Subverting the immutability of Black skin, as epitomised by the well-known epigram ‘to wash an Ethiop, white’,174 Aaron elevates the indelible, ‘natural’ and ‘stable’ quality of Blackness as a superior characteristic in comparison with whiteness’s instability. Through a clever piece of stage irony, he questions the veracity and inherent value of whiteness:

Like women’s cosmetically attained whiteness, Lee’s white skin, like ‘lim’d walls’ and ‘alehouse signs’, is a temporary surface, open to alteration and spoilage. Furthermore, like the impossibility of turning ‘the swan’s black legs to white’,176 Aaron posits the origins of human existence as racially Black, thus questioning the innate value and status of whiteness, and the common belief at the time that all human beings were once white.177

As a visual apology to Elizabeth I, Marcus Gheeraerts, with the assistance of his patron Henry Lee, has imbued the Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee with every conceivable motif and emblem that alludes to Elizabeth’s greatness, and to Thomas Lee’s commitment to her colonialist ambitions. From his masquerade role as a noble barbarian, he can lower his civility, parade his manly appeal and, sheltering under an English oak tree, be assured of Elizabeth’s protection, while himself protecting Albion from foreign alteration. However, what might appear as unmitigated confidence is in fact an unwitting display of nationalistic precarity, indicated not by the wearing of white cosmetics, but by the darkened skin, revealed by the removal of Lee’s Spanish helmet and by his soiled feet. Race, then as now, appears in the portrait as an unstable marker of human identity and nationalism.

Captions: Marcus Gheeraerts, Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee

Current caption
This striking portrait is highly political. Thomas Lee was an officer in Elizabeth I’s army, fighting to colonise Ireland. His expensive embroidered shirt and ornate armaments express wealth and status. Yet his bare legs refer to the uniform of Irish kerns (foot soldiers), the lowest status fighters. This may be a reference to Lee’s complaints that English officers in Ireland were poorly paid. The portrait was probably produced to show Lee’s loyalty to the queen after he was suspected of treachery. He seems to be saying: despite appearances, I’m loyal to my own side.

Alternative caption
How do you transform a soldier and ruffian into a devoted noble knight, fit to be presented to Queen Elizabeth I? Captain Thomas Lee’s top half is civilised and mannered, his bottom half barbaric and uncouth. Gheeraerts uses Lee’s skin as a map on which to delineate the sitter’s colonial exploits and loyalty to Albion, or ‘white land’. The pale forehead is the consequence of wearing a helmet in battle, while the ruddy cheeks are an indicator of how he hazards his body ‘abroade’. The scarred ultra-white hand and the marble luminosity of his blue-veined legs are an allusion to Roman and medieval heroics.