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The sitter in this portrait is traditionally-and probably quite correctly-identified as Catherine Killigrew (?1579 -1640), daughter of William Killigrew, Groom of the Privy Chamber to Elizabeth I. In 1559 she married Sir Thomas Jermyn of Rushbrook, who inherited Rushbrook Park in Suffolk from his father in 1614, and it is possible that he commissioned Gheeraerts to paint his wife on this occasion. In the upper right corner of the portrait an inscription, painted by Gheeraerts himself,1 reads Aetatis Suae 35 Anno: 1614 [in the year 1614 at her age of 35]. The portrait was sold from the family collection at Rushbrook in 1919.
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger moved to London with his family in the late 1560s in the wake of religious persecution in the Netherlands. He was trained as a painter by his father, a printmaker and painter himself, and by Lucas de Heere, another Netherlandish painter who worked for a time in London. Gheeraerts became well known in Elizabethan court circles, primarily through the patronage of Sir Henry Lee, and his most important commission came from Sir Henry in 1592: a full-length portrait of Elizabeth I to mark the occasion of her visit to his estate, Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. Gheeraerts's portrait of Elizabeth, now known as the Ditchley Portrait (National Portrait Gallery, London), sealed his reputation, and he enjoyed court patronage throughout Elizabeth's reign. After the accession to the throne of James I in 1603, Gheeraerts continued to benefit from royal favor in part because the king's wife, Anne of Denmark, chose to sit to him. His full-length portrait of Queen Anne, painted c. 1611-14, ensured his enduring success at court throughout that decade.
The present portrait of Lady Jermyn displays Gheeraerts's virtuosity in rendering not only the weaves of different fabrics, such as translucent lace, smooth silk, and embroidery, but also the various textures of ?esh.It is the sumptuous fabrics of Lady Jermyn's clothing that convey her wealth and status; she wears little jewelry (only a small diamond-set thumb-ring, possibly her wedding ring, and two plain gold loop earrings), which is noteworthy given the Elizabethan and Jacobean predilection for displaying one's ?nest jewels in one's portrait. In its relative lack of pomp and its attention to the particularity of the sitter's features (such as the line of her nose), Lady Jermyn stands in contrast to the hieratic and iconic full-length images typical of late Elizabethan and Jacobean portraiture, as seen in van Somer's Elizabeth, Countess of Kellie (no. 2). The directness of Lady Jermyn's gaze, combined with the minute detail of her clothing and face, imparts to the painting a remarkable sense of closeness to and communication with the sitter. In its jewel-like precision the painting resembles a miniature portrait blown up to life-size; indeed, it is possible that Gheeraerts may have been in?uenced, in both the format of his portraits and their technique, by the work of his brother-in-law Isaac Oliver the miniaturist, who became limner to Anne of Denmark in 1605. The intimacy of the format and the delicacy and detail of the painted surfaces make this work a prime example of Gheeraerts's later style and also of the more private strains of Jacobean portraiture.

1. Millar 1963, 534.

Julia Marciari-Alexander

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, p. 24, no. 1, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)