ABSTRACT
We are already well aware that portraits, in common with other types of painted images, might be displayed in an early modern domestic interior to register socially advantageous connections and herald the status and wealth of the siĴer.1 But how were Elizabethan and Jacobean portraits integrated into the lives of households and the practices of individuals? And was the power of Tudor portraiture in a domestic space rooted outside the aesthetic and primarily in the identification of the siĴer? Although this essay raises more questions that it can answer, it will briefly survey some of the roles played by portraits of monarchs, portraits produced as sets and portraits of individuals within Tudor and Jacobean households. It will focus principally on paintings commissioned for houses of the gentry, and more modest households of merchants and professionals (categorised here as the middling sort, or middle elites).2 I suggest that portraiture had a historical, national, moral and spiritual role to play in the everyday lives of viewers and siĴers. Through the promotion and reflection of specific virtues, portraits of various types might well serve as more than unchanging exemplars, and instead actively elicit a sense of nationhood or historical continuity, or a suitable remembrance of virtue.
