Quentin Metsys the Younger

Quentin Metsys the Younger (Quinten or Massys; c. 1543 – 1589)[1] was a Flemish Renaissance painter, one of several of his countrymen active as artists of the Tudor court in the reign of Elizabeth I of England.

The younger Quentin was born in Antwerp, where he joined the Guild of St. Luke in 1574; by c. 1581 he was living in London, likely having fled religious persecution in Antwerp as his father and uncle had done.

[2] He is best known for the Sieve Portrait of Elizabeth I, commissioned by Christopher Hatton in 1583, in which she is depicted as Tuccia, a Vestal Virgin who proved her chastity by carrying water from the Tiber River to the Temple of Vesta without spilling a drop.

[3] Elizabeth is surrounded by symbols of empire, including a column and a globe, iconography that would appear again and again in her portraiture of the 1580s and 1590s, most notably in the Armada Portrait of 1588.

[4] This article about a Dutch or Flemish painter mainly active before c. 1581 (the division of the Low Countries into the Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands) is a stub.