This beautifully produced book is a joy to hold and leaf through. It contains more than two hundred illustrations, some well known but many of them held in private collections and reproduced here in color for the first time. The book is equally a pleasure to read, as Elizabeth Goldring presents her meticulous research lucidly and carefully, with thought and nuance. Providing insights into Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester's character and career, her work will be essential reading for anyone with a strong interest in Elizabethan politics and portraiture.
Throughout the book, Goldring sets Leicester's artistic patronage within its biographical, cultural, and political contexts. In the first section she provides an overview of his patronage and explains the intellectual milieu into which he was born and grew up. In the next two, she structures her material chronologically to explain the nature, extent, and motives behind Dudley's commissioning and collecting of portraits from Elizabeth's accession until his death in 1588. In the third section, Goldring describes the earl's extensive building projects at Kenilworth Castle and the layout of Wanstead Manor and Leicester House, where the picture collections were displayed. In an epilogue, she traces their dispersal after his death, a process that was unusually complex because of his debts to the crown and lack of direct heir. Three appendices detailing the works of art in the extant inventories of his houses conclude the text.
Overall, Goldring demonstrates conclusively that Dudley was the preeminent patron of his age, commissioning and sitting for more portraits than any other Elizabethan courtier, and actively collecting portraits, sculptures, miniatures, drawings, medals, maps, and engravings. Although the collection at Kenilworth Castle was the primary focus of the earl's attention, Goldring surmises that by 1588, even the collection at Leicester House was “quite possibly” the largest in Elizabethan London, bar the Royal Collection, and one of the largest in England. Goldring documents how the earl fostered the career of the young Nicholas Hilliard, brought Federico Zuccaro to England, and introduced artists such as Hubert Beuckelaar and William Segar to the Elizabethan elite. More debatably, Goldring also claims that Leicester “decisively” shaped the queen's image, influenced the taste of foreign royals, notably the Valois, and played a pivotal role in the emergence of an English-language discourse on the visual arts. Much that Dudley did as a patron, moreover, she deems novel: for example, he was the first—if not the only collector—to use a foreign ambassador in England to acquire portraits from abroad. At the same time, she shows that Leicester was influenced by the artistic sensibilities of his nephew Philip Sidney, who acquired pictures for his uncle during both his Continental travels and later campaign in the Netherlands.
Leicester's extraordinary artistic patronage, Goldring explains, was part of his wider cultural and intellectual interests. She argues that he also used portraiture to mark, explain, and interpret events of familial or political significance: his position as the queen's favorite and suitor during the 1560s and 1570s; his role as husband to the Dowager Countess of Essex after 1578; and as the proud father of his son Robert, Baron Denbigh. It is remarkable that in a period when young elite children were rarely depicted in separate portraits, Denbigh was painted separately three times before his death at the age of just three. Leicester also used portraiture to provide a visual record of his expedition to the Netherlands, commissioning several new portraits ca. 1585 to mark his appointment as a military leader and taking William Segar to Holland and Zealand, presumably to act as his court painter. While in the Netherlands, moreover, Leicester purchased paintings, objets d'art, and maps, many of which extended his taste beyond earlier acquisitions.
Goldring's commentary on individual portraits is penetrating, often revealing iconographic details that the viewer might otherwise miss. So, for example, when considering the Wallace Collection portrait of Dudley, she draws our attention to the helmet in his hand which “no doubt” alludes to his role at the battle of Saint-Quentin; likewise in the Waddesdon Manor portrait, she points out that the jewel in his cap depicts the Roman soldier Marcus Curtius on horseback, “evoking thoughts” of Dudley's position as master of the horse and military ambitions (59). Furthermore, she shows that the inclusion of imperial columns and a hound in this portrait displays Dudley's knowledge of continental paintings and prints, and she suggests that his appropriation of Habsburg iconography just when the queen was engaged in matrimonial negotiations with the Archduke Charles of Austria might have been a means of conveying a sense of his worth as a rival matrimonial suitor.
When discussing the display spaces and settings for Leicester's collections, Goldring likewise has interesting points to make. She explains that, in contrast to other great Elizabethan collectors, the earl lined the walls of Kenilworth Castle with portraits of historical and contemporary uomini illustri to the almost complete exclusion of images of his own ancestors and family members, thereby making “a powerful if unconventional, statement about his own ambitions,” especially in the Netherlands (188).
Given the limited nature of the surviving documentation, Goldring inevitably has to posit hypotheses and interpretations for which there is no direct evidence. In all cases she clearly signposts when she is doing so. Some of her reconstructions may be contested but they are usually persuasive, based on her deep and wide knowledge of other collections and paintings. Even though Leicester has long appeared in the historiography as a cultured courtier with wide intellectual interests and continental networks, this book adds to our understanding of his patronage in a delightful read.
