Rare portrait of Elizabeth I owned by North Carolina Garden Club shown in Washington
A painting of a sixtysomething Queen Elizabeth I, depicting her with facial wrinkles, is being exhibited at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
Produced by the studio of Gheeraerts in the early-mid 1590s, the painting now owned by the Elizabethan Gardens in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, is having its first public showing after conservation and authentication in 2010-2011.
The exhibition’s co-curator, Thomas Herron, an author and English professor at East Carolina University, noted that the reason for the portrait’s obscurity may lie in Elizabeth’s efforts to control her image.
And according to Anna Riehl, author of The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Queen Elizabeth I the Elizabethan Gardens portrait is a "rare exception in not covering up the queen's flaws”....