page_title: Robert Peake the Elder
section_title: Procession Picture
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Peake the Elder / Paintings / Procession Picture
caption_attribution_description: Elizabeth Stuart, eldest daughter of James I/VI of England and Scotland. She married Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and briefly ruled as queen of Bohemia. Nicknamed the Winter Queen, because of the short tenure she and her husband had in Bohemia.
context_page_description: Robert Peake the Elder was an English painter active in the later part of Elizabeth I's reign and for most of the reign of James I. 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. Peake is often called "the elder", to distinguish him from his son, the painter and print seller William Peake and from his grandson, Sir Robert Peake, who followed his father into the family print-selling business.
  Peake was the only English-born painter of a group of four artists whose workshops were closely connected. The others were De Critz, Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, and the miniature painter Isaac Oliver. Between 1590 and about 1625, they specialised in brilliantly coloured, full-length "costume pieces" that are unique to England at this time. It is not always possible to attribute authorship between Peake, De Critz, Gheeraerts and their assistants with certainty.
context_section_description: The painting known as Queen Elizabeth going in procession to Blackfriars in 1601, or simply The Procession Picture  (see illustration), is now often accepted as the work of Peake. The attribution was made by Roy Strong, who called it "one of the great visual mysteries of the Elizabethan age". It is an example of the convention, prevalent in the later part of her reign, of painting Elizabeth as an icon, portraying her as much younger and more triumphant than she was. 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". George Vertue, the eighteenth-century antiquarian, called the painting "not well nor ill done".
  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. 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. Strong also suggests that the landscape and castles in the background are not intended to be realistic. 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. The earl may have commissioned the picture to celebrate his appointment as Master of the Queen's Horse in 1601.
  Peake clearly did not paint the queen, or indeed the courtiers, from life but from the "types" or standard portraits used by the workshops of the day. Portraits of the queen were subject to restrictions, and from about 1594 there seems to have been an official policy that she always be depicted as youthful. In 1594, the Privy council ordered that unseemly portraits of the queen be found and destroyed, since they caused Elizabeth "great offence". 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. It is clear that Gheeraerts' portrait provided the pattern for the queen's image in the procession picture. Other figures also show signs of being traced from patterns, leading to infelicities of perspective and proportion.
caption: Princess Elizabeth, later Queen of Bohemia, 1606; her grandson inherited the English throne as George I.
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