I’m very much enjoying my current research into the life of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia as a child. A particular delight has been the work of Robert Peake the Elder who died in 1619 and who was commissioned to paint several portraits of Elizabeth as well as her brothers, Henry Frederick and Charles .
Peake was an apprentice of the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard. He became a freeman of the Company of Goldsmiths in 1576. By the 1590s he was a fashionable portrait painter at the court of Elizabeth I.
In 1607 he was appointed sergeant-painter to King James I having already been appointed, in 1604, as picture maker to Prince Henry. It was his task to paint the portraits that were sent as gifts to foreign kings and princes. And when not required to do that he was responsible for making sure that the royal collection was up to scratch and if the queen wanted some scenery for a masque that was his job as well.
After Henry’s death in 1612, Peake moved to the household of Henry and Elizabeth’s younger brother, Charles. He died in 1619, the same year as Anne of Denmark. His death and the death of Nicholas Hilliard (1619) saw a change in the way portraits were painted. The style would become increasingly baroque rather than full of the detail viewers often associate with the works of Holbein, Hilliard and Peake – but they also became more fluid. The pictures of Princess Elizabeth, lovely as they may be, as quite stiff in comparison to the work of later artists.
Auerbach, Erna. Tudor artists; a study of painters in the royal service and of portraiture on illuminated documents from the accession of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I. (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1954)
Strong, Ro., The Elizabethan Image.