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In format, this miniature – which seems to record its sitter’s involvement in a masque – is very similar to one of Anne of Denmark (1574–1619), as depicted by Oliver in masquing attire in right-facing profile, c. 1610 (Royal Collection). Presumably, Oliver’s image of Queen Anne was designed to commemorate her appearance in one of the six masques in which she is known to have appeared at Whitehall Palace between 1604 and 1611. Other sitters portrayed by Oliver in right-facing profile include Henry (1594–1612), Prince of Wales (Fitzwilliam Museum, fig. 28) and Edward Herbert (1583–1617), 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (Royal Collection). The former image (of which multiple copies survive) may have been commissioned to mark the prince’s performance in one of two masques by Ben Jonson: Prince Henry’s Barriers, which was mounted at Whitehall in 1610 to celebrate his installation as Prince of Wales, or Oberon, the Faery Prince, which was staged at Whitehall the following year (with Henry...
In format, this miniature – which seems to record its sitter’s involvement in a masque – is very similar to one of Anne of Denmark (1574–1619), as depicted by Oliver in masquing attire in right-facing profile, c. 1610 (Royal Collection). Presumably, Oliver’s image of Queen Anne was designed to commemorate her appearance in one of the six masques in which she is known to have appeared at Whitehall Palace between 1604 and 1611. Other sitters portrayed by Oliver in right-facing profile include Henry (1594–1612), Prince of Wales (Fitzwilliam Museum, fig. 28) and Edward Herbert (1583–1617), 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (Royal Collection). The former image (of which multiple copies survive) may have been commissioned to mark the prince’s performance in one of two masques by Ben Jonson: Prince Henry’s Barriers, which was mounted at Whitehall in 1610 to celebrate his installation as Prince of Wales, or Oberon, the Faery Prince, which was staged at Whitehall the following year (with Henry in the title role).[1]
Oliver’s use of the profile format – associated, from antiquity, with rulers and ultimately derived from ancient coins and medals – seems to have been restricted to his most illustrious sitters. The Queen, the Prince of Wales and Lord Herbert of Cherbury were all known for their learning, their patronage of the arts and their embrace of the Italianate. Presumably, the sitter depicted in this miniature from the Bearsted Collection was too. It may never be possible to establish her identity with certainty, but the likelihood is that she was a lady of high rank known for her participation in masques, either those staged at court, typically at Whitehall, or within the confines of private aristocratic residences.
Often, as in this miniature, which exposes the sitter’s breasts, masquing attire was risqué, revealing more of the female form than normally would have been permitted.[2] The absence of an elaborate headdress of the kind typically encountered in the masques mounted at Whitehall – knowledge of which derives from images such as Oliver’s profile portrait of Anne of Denmark and from the survival of some of Inigo Jones’ costume sketches – has led one art historian to question whether this miniature from the Bearsted Collection does, in fact, depict its sitter in masquing attire.[3] It is important to remember, however, that not every character in the masques mounted at Whitehall was called upon to wear a headdress. Ben Jonson’s Masque of Beauty, which was staged at the palace in 1608, included a character called ‘Splendor’ who entered dressed ‘in a robe of flame-colour, naked breasted; her bright hair loose flowing’.[4] It is a description which could almost refer to the lady seen in this Oliver miniature.
That said, it is perhaps more likely that the occasion recorded by Oliver was mounted in a private house, where, generally speaking, the costumes – particularly the headdresses – were less fantastical than at Whitehall. [5] The atmosphere of such occasions is vividly captured by Sir Rowland Whyte’s eyewitness account of a masque staged in June 1600, in the presence of Elizabeth I, at the Blackfriars residence of Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham, to celebrate a glittering dynastic union: the marriage of Henry Somerset, 1st Marquess of Worcester, and Anne Russell. According to Whyte, the eight lady masquers – a group that included Lady Blanche Somerset (the bridegroom’s sister) and Bess Russell (the bride’s sister) – performed a dance ‘to the music Apollo brings’, each dressed in ’a skirt of cloth of silver, a rich waistcoat wrought with silks and gold and silver, a mantel of carnation taffeta cast under the arm, and their hair loose about their shoulders’.[6] It, too, is a description that could almost apply to the lady depicted in this miniature from the Bearsted Collection.
Curiously, the sitter wears, in her right ear, a lock of hair mounted on, and suspended from, a pendant pearl earring, a detail emphasised by the fact that she has been portrayed by Oliver in right-facing profile. Normally, hair earrings were worn as memento mori.[7] Why the sitter in this miniature from the Bearsted Collection should have chosen to be portrayed thus in a portrait which otherwise seems to record her appearance in a masque (by definition, a celebratory occasion) remains unclear.[8] The sitter in this miniature once was identified as Alice (1559–1637), née Spencer, Countess of Derby. [9] Alice was a noted patron of the masque (and the mother of another – Elizabeth Stanley, later Countess of Huntingdon – the presumed sitter in a miniature by Nicholas Hilliard formerly in the Bearsted Collection; cat. 1).[10] However, comparison of the physical features of the lady portrayed here with secure portraits of Alice suggests that she is not Oliver’s sitter.[11] [EG]
[1] See MacLeod, Elizabethan Treasures, p. 199, who notes that ‘at least three direct copies’ of the Fitzwilliam miniature are known to be extant.
[2] See Susan Doran, From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I (Oxford 2024), pp. 239-
45.
[3]See Strong, Artists of the Tudor Court, p. 111 (no. 168): ‘As the hair is not a vehicle for an elaborate head-dress it is not a masque portrait.’
[4] For Splendor’s entrance, see John Nichols (ed.), The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James
the First, his royal consort, family and court [London, 1745-1826], 4 vols, II, p. 168; italics added. It is unclear which lady of the court played this role. Nor are designs for Splendor’s costume known to survive.
[5] This suggestion was first made in Hendra et al., Jewel in the Hand, p. 86 (no. 24).
[6] Michael Brennan, Noel Kinnamon, and Margaret Hannay (eds.), The Letters of Rowland Whyte (Philadelphia, 2013), p.498; italics added. The other masquers were Lady Dorothy Hastings, Mary Fitton, Elizabeth Carey, Elizabeth Southwell, and mistresses Onslow and Darcy.
[7] An oil painting executed by Anthony van Dyck, c.1636 (private collection) depicts Frances Devereux (1599-1674), Countess of Hertford – daughter of Robert Devereux (1565-1601), 2nd Earl of Essex – wearing a hair earring said to have been made from locks cut off her father’s head before his execution for treason in 1601. The painting was sold at Sotheby’s,
London, in 2014. See https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/old-master-britishpaintings-evening-l14033/lot.18.html. Extant examples of hair earrings – including some reputed to contain locks of Essex’s hair – may be found at Ham House, Surrey (National Trust ref NT 1140215.2). See https://www.nationaltrustcollections.o...
[8] It is worth noting, however, that the festivities mounted at Blackfriars in June 1600 to mark the marriage of Henry Somerset and Anne Russell quickly turned to tragedy. A fortnight after the wedding, Bess Russell – the bride’s sister and one of the eight lady masquers who had danced with ‘a mantel of carnation taffeta cast under the arm, and … hair loose about [the] shoulders’ – died unexpectedly. This sequence of events may be followed in Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Pimlico, 1999; 1st pr. 1977), pp. 28–30.
[9] This traditional identification dates at least as far back as 1938, in which year the miniature was exhibited at Burlington House/The Royal Academy. Roy Strong and V. J. Murrell were the first to question the identification, calling it ‘unlikely’, in their catalogue accompanying the 1983 V&A exhibition Artists of the Tudor Court, p. 111 (no. 168).
[10] For Alice, who was Countess of Derby by virtue of her first marriage, to Ferdinando Stanley (1559 – 1594), 5th Earl of Derby (and continued to style herself Countess of Derby even after her second marriage, in 1600, to Sir Thomas
Egerton, later 1st Viscount Brackley), see Wilkie, 5 A Woman of Influence.
[11] For portraits of Alice, see Edward Town and Jessica David, ‘The Portraits of Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, and her family by Paul van Somer,’ The Burlington Magazine, vol. 167, no. 1465 (April 2025), pp. 376–85.
