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1 of 253523 objects
Margaret, Lady Elyot (c.1500-1560) c.1532-4
Black and coloured chalks, white bodycolour, and pen and ink on pale pink prepared paper | 27.8 x 20.8 cm (sheet of paper) | RCIN 912204
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A portrait drawing of Margaret, Lady Elyot (c.1500-1560), daughter of Sir Maurice à Barrow, and wife of Sir Thomas Elyot. The portrait shows her head and shoulders facing three-quarters to the right. She wears a yellow gable headdress and pendant. A companion portrait to RL 12203 of Sir Thomas Elyot. Inscribed in an eighteenth-century hand at upper right: The Lady Eliot.
Margaret Abaragh (c.1500-1560), who married the author Thomas Elyot in 1520, was an intellectual in her own right: the late sixteenth-century writer Thomas Stapleton noted that she ‘also gave herself to the study of literature’. Margaret Elyot outlived Sir Thomas by nearly 15 years, and married, as her second husband, Sir James Dyer, a scholarly lawyer who was to become Speaker of the House of Commons.
This drawing of Lady Elyot is a pair to the portrait of her husband. Both were presumably intended as studies for oil paintings, which, if they were completed, have not survived. Unusually for a marriage pair, Lady Elyot is shown on the left, with her husband on the right. Susan Foister has suggested that this may indicate that one of the drawings was completed before the idea of a pair was decided upon.
Catalogue entry adapted from The Northern Renaissance. Dürer to Holbein, London 2011Provenance
Henry VIII; Edward VI, 1547; Henry FitzAlan, 12th Earl of Arundel; by whom bequeathed to John, Lord Lumley, 1580; by whom probably bequeathed to Henry, Prince of Wales, 1609, and thus inherited by Prince Charles (later Charles I), 1612; by whom exchanged with Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, 1627/8; by whom given to Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel; acquired by Charles II by 1675
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Creator(s)
Acquirer(s)
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Medium and techniques
Black and coloured chalks, white bodycolour, and pen and ink on pale pink prepared paper
black chalk, yellow chalk, red chalk, brown chalk, white bodycolour, pen and ink, pale pink prepared paperMeasurements
27.8 x 20.8 cm (sheet of paper)
Markings
watermark: Briquet 1050: fleurs de lys and other in a crowned shield [same as 12247]
Object type(s)
Other number(s)
RL 12204Featured in
ExhibitionThe Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein : The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace
Over 100 works by the greatest Northern European artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
