Susan James, a Cambridge-trained independent scholar best known for her biography of Katherine Parr, undertakes here an archivally based and markedly polemical account of the female role in Tudor art, especially portraiture. She takes us through women's role in regard to painting as an object of patronage and presentation, as propaganda, as a medium for asserting power, and as an economic, often family-based, activity. Other visual media enter into the discussion from time to time as do references to continental European artistic and cultural activities. The book concludes with extended studies of two important foreign-born and trained female painters who settled in England with their families and carved out prominent careers: Susanna Horenboult and Levina Teerlinc (to use the conventional spelling over James's idiosyncratic preference for “Lievine”).

James's subject has needed its historian for a very long time, and her archival trawling brings to light all sorts of relevant and detailed information pertinent to it. Yet in her dogged determination to make her case at all costs, James has failed in many respects to produce the book one needs to have and must still hope to find.

Some of these shortcomings must be placed at the feet of her publishers. It is regrettable that Ashgate allowed a work on such an important subject to come forth with an index containing only proper names and no subheadings. James's evident lack of systematic training in the field, or of sustained contact with many of those working and writing on the issues at hand who might have pointed out the problems or referred her to appropriate published sources, remains apparent throughout.

Persistent problems with the use of evidence prove especially troublesome. First, she seems not to appreciate the distinction between painters and artists: the latter term is employed throughout, though very few women or men at that time could be considered artists as opposed to mere painters. Most “painters” of this era were primarily craftsmen in the building trades and mostly engaged in housepainting and/or decorative work. Just what constituted art or an artist in sixteenth-century England is still very much an open question, but one which is not addressed here; everyone who painted seems to be an artist. Second, the case made here for the prominence of women, especially as “artist” but also as sitters with a major role in determining the appearance of a portrait and widows who engage as painters, remains consistently overstated. Any woman who possessed painter's equipment, whether inherited from a spouse or not, seems automatically to have become not merely a painter herself, but indeed an artist. We find, for example, the “practicing artist” Alice Gammedge of Walden, Essex, leaving painter's equipment in her will but for whom no evidence of having actually painted is offered (47–48, 240). Alice Heron (wife and widow of Serjeant Painter William Heron, both more familiarly known as “Herne”) appears in the same list of English “artists” as Nicholas Hilliard and George Gower (2), as if on par with them. Though James would have us believe that women “artists” were numerous and important, and though she does offer valuable discussions of Teerlinc and Horenboult, she offers up very few indeed in this 358-page monograph devoted to the subject, even including those with credentials as dubious as Gammedge's and Heron’s.

The tendency to argue well beyond her evidence, with far too frequent statement of the “we can therefore assume” variety, remains constantly problematic. In just one unfortunately typical eight-page span, we find “the context makes it likely that,” “it would be reasonable to expect that,” “it is difficult to escape the possibility that,” and “it seems logical to deduce that” (33–41). More distressing are stark assertions for which no evidence is offered and which are either dubiously accurate or altogether incorrect. One will be surprised to find the sweeping statement that “houses belonging to lower income farmers and yeomen generally had but three rooms” (115) or (twenty years after David Cressy's pathbreaking Bonfires and Bells [Berkeley, 1989]) that public celebrations of a propagandistic nature were “limited to a greater London audience” (141) or, very distressing indeed, that both the “Phoenix” and the “Pelican” portraits of Elizabeth were painted by Levina Teerlinc (322–32)! James presents no definitive evidence for this last remarkable assertion save that the color vermilion and some of the imagery, including the Tudor rose, are also to be found in Teerlinc's works, and that both portraits bear references to portrait miniatures: a genre in which Teerlinc also engaged. Nicholas Hilliard, long accepted as the likely painter by virtually all modern authorities, doesn’t enter the discussion.

It is ironic that evidence that could substantiate or strengthen particular points remains undiscovered. Thus, the discussion of women as portrait subjects works reasonably well to a point, with some interesting and hard-won archival trawling on individual cases. But James remains entirely unaware of the myriad female sitters of the middling sort who had single or even multiple portraits done even when such information is readily available. Two portraits of Lady Devorguilla, benefactress of Balliol; the five of Joyce Frankland, benefactress of four Oxbridge colleges; the striking (and much-written-about) double portrait of John and Joan Cooke, founders of the Crypt School in Gloucester; and the posthumous ca. 1586 portrait of Lady Godiva—extremely important in post-Reformation Coventry—are among the many omitted here. So are many benefactress portraits in provincial towns, including Joan Goldston and Isabelle Thornton of Gloucester, Joan Popley of Salisbury, Anne Rede and Joanna Smith of Norwich, and Joan Tuckfied of Exeter. These and other sitters like them are either listed in the Heinz Archive of the National Portrait Gallery, discussed in secondary literature, or actually pictured on the Internet.

In sum, the subject at hand here now has its ardent polemicist; one hopes its trustworthy historian waits somewhere in the wings.