ABSTRACT
A great deal has been wriĴen on the collection of portraiture in early modern England as a function of personal self-fashioning and social legitimation. We see it as a form of conspicuous consumption and display for personal reasons or, when practised by monarchy, as an accoutrement to the desired images of kingship or queenship.1 And we think of such collections, quite rightly, as consisting of material objects whose decorative and emotive functions required that they be displayed in particular spaces and with particular viewing audiences in mind: the long galleries, great halls and chambers of country houses, where visitors – ranging from monarchs on their progresses to neighbours, kin and political associates – would be sure to see them. Such portraits identified the patrons or his/her family; they established at a glance his or her claims to family ancestry, personal achievement, political and/or religious loyalties, historical associations, habits of mind and other marks of
character.2 Other, somewhat more intimate portraits tended to be hung in such more private spaces of the house as bedchambers, withdrawing rooms and ‘closets’, where they were intended for viewing only by members of the resident family and special guests. The most private space of all, of course, would have been found for that small, specialised and very intimate genre of the portrait miniature. These would not have been publicly displayed at all, but rather kept, oĞen encased in lockets, in private chests or drawers, for the owner’s own intimate appreciation.3 Of course, we also now know that not all those who acquired and displayed portraits were members of the country house set. Such images also came commonly to be acquired and displayed in the homes of a surprisingly wide spectrum of the elite and middling sorts of people, urban as well as rural, by the laĴer decades of the sixteenth century.4
