Robert Peake the Elder
[1] In 1604, he was appointed picture maker to the heir to the throne, Prince Henry; and in 1607, serjeant-painter to King James I – a post he shared with John De Critz.
In 1607, after the death of Leonard Fryer,[19] Peake was appointed serjeant-painter to King James I, sharing the office with John De Critz, who had held the post since 1603.
In addition to copying and restoring portraits, the serjeant-painters also undertook decorative tasks, such as the painting of banners and stage scenery.
[21] Parchment rolls of the Office of the Works record that De Critz oversaw the decorating of royal houses and palaces.
[9] Scholars have deduced from payments made to Peake that his position as painter to Prince Henry led to his appointment as serjeant-painter to the king.
[14] The payments were listed by the Prince's household officer Sir David Murray as disbursements from the Privy Purse to "Mr Peck".
Also listed is "Mr Peake the younger painter", meaning Robert's son William, who was allotted four yards of mourning cloth.
Erna Auerbach, put his death at around 1625,[30] and the catalogue for the 1972 The Age of Charles I exhibition at the Tate Gallery suggested Peake was active as late as 1635.
Nicholas Hilliard had died in January 1619; Anne of Denmark, who had done so much to patronise the arts, in March; and the painter William Larkin, Peake's neighbour, in April or May.
[33] Though James I reigned until 1625, art historian Roy Strong considers that the year 1619 "can satisfactorily be accepted as the terminal date of Jacobean painting".
As Strong puts it, "[t]his is Gloriana in her sunset glory, the mistress of the set piece, of the calculated spectacular presentation of herself to her adoring subjects".
[38] Strong reveals that the procession was connected to the marriage of Henry Somerset, Lord Herbert, and Lady Anne Russell, one of the queen's six maids of honour, on 16 June 1600.
[39] He identifies many of the individuals portrayed in the procession and shows that instead of a litter, as was previously assumed, Queen Elizabeth is sitting on a wheeled cart or chariot.
In accordance with Elizabethan stylistic conventions, they are emblematic, here representing the Welsh properties of Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, to which his son Lord Herbert was the heir.
In 1594, the Privy council ordered that unseemly portraits of the queen be found and destroyed, since they caused Elizabeth "great offence".
[42] The famous Ditchley portrait (c. 1592), by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, was used as a type, sometimes called the "Mask of Youth" face-pattern, for the remainder of the reign.
[44] At the beginning of the 1590s, the full-length portrait came into vogue and artistic patrons among the nobles began to add galleries of such paintings to their homes as a form of cultural ostentation.
He was also among the earliest English painters to explore the full-length individual or group portrait with active figures placed in a natural landscape, a style of painting that became fashionable in England.
The double portrait is set outdoors, a style introduced by Gheeraerts in the 1590s, and Peake's combination of figures with animals and landscape also foreshadows the genre of the sporting picture.
[58] Loose hair and the classical draped mantle also figure in contemporary personifications of abstract concepts in masques and paintings.
Yale art historian Ellen Chirelstein argues that Peake is portraying Lady Elizabeth as a personification of America, since her father, Sir Thomas Watson, was a major shareholder in the Virginia Company.
[18] In 1612, Henry Peacham wrote in The Gentleman's Exercise that his "good friend Mr Peake", along with Marcus Gheeraerts, was outstanding "for oil colours".
He describes Peake's Cambridge portrait, Prince Charles, as Duke of York as poorly drawn, with a lifeless pose, in a stereotyped composition that "confirms the artist's reliance on a much repeated formula in his later years".
[46] Art historian and curator Karen Hearn, on the other hand, praises the work as "magnificent" and draws attention to the naturalistically rendered note pinned to the curtain.
[65] Depicting Prince Charles wearing the Garter and Lesser George, Peake here reverts to a more formal, traditional style of portraiture.
