Portrait of Unknown Lady c.1595 Fine Art Poster

Portrait of an Unknown Lady, c. 1595 (possibly Lettice Knollys, Countess of Leicester), attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts II. Oil on wood, 92.7 x 76 cm. London, Tate Britain Born in the Netherlands, Marcus Gheeraerts (also written as Gerards or Geerards) (Bruges, c. 1561/62 - 19 January 1636) was an artist of the Tudor court. He was brought to England as a child by his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, also a painter. He became a fashionable portraitist in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I under the patronage of her champion and pageant-master Sir Henry Lee, introducing a new aesthetic in English court painting that captured the essence of a sitter through close observation. He became a favourite portraitist of James I's queen Anne of Denmark, but fell out of fashion in the later 1610s. During the Elizabethan era portraits of pregnant women such as this one were often painted, both as a celebration of bearing children and to record the features of a beloved woman who might soon be dead.