The Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, is renowned for its portraits from the Tudor and Jacobean eras, many of which are on display at the Gallery or at Montacute House, our regional partner in Somerset. This book presents portraits of key individuals from this period, from the monarchs and members of the ruling elite to the writers, artists and artisans that characterised the literary and artistic flourishing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An introductory essay provides important historical context, and the ninety works selected from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and National Trust are accompanied by extended captions exploring the sitter and artist's significance to the period and technical information about the portrait. The publication features sections on Tudor monarchs, the Stuarts, courtiers, the family in portraiture, and iconography.The Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London, is renowned for its portraits from the Tudor and Jacobean eras, many of which are on display at the Gallery or at Montacute House, our regional partner in Somerset. This book presents portraits of key individuals from this period, from the monarchs and members of the ruling elite to the writers, artists and artisans that characterised the literary and artistic flourishing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. An introductory essay provides important historical context, and the ninety works selected from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and National Trust are accompanied by extended captions exploring the sitter and artist's significance to the period and technical information about the portrait. The publication features sections on Tudor monarchs, the Stuarts, courtiers, the family in portraiture, and iconography.

More than 150 works of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs and their coutiers.

This accessible and visually stunning guide puts Tudor and Jacobean portraits into historical context. Many of these important works are in museums and country houses across the UK, and this introductory guide invites the reader to look afresh and to understand why and how they were created.

For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elite and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavor. But in the second half of the 16th century, access began to widen to the urban middle class, including merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergy, writers, and musicians. As portraiture proliferated in English cities and towns, the middle class gained social visibility--not just for themselves as individuals, but for their entire class or industry. In Citizen Portrait, Tarnya Cooper examines the patronage and production of portraits in Tudor and Jacobean England, focusing on the motivations of those who chose to be painted and the impact of the resulting images. Highlighting the opposing, yet common, themes of piety and self-promotion, Cooper has revealed a fresh area of interest for scholars of early modern British art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art