Sables, ruffs and doublets

Roy Strong first encountered the portraiture of Elizabeth I and her court while a schoolboy in post-war Edmonton. In the early 1950s, as a second Elizabethan age beckoned, the teenaged Strong unexpectedly found himself face to face with the ‘Ermine’ and ‘Rainbow’ portraits of the Virgin Queen on a day trip to nearby Hatfield House. It was, as he later recalled in his Self-Portrait as a Young Man, ‘the birth of a love affair’. Shortly after, he began compiling a card index of Elizabeth I’s portraits and trying his hand at painting miniatures in the style of Nicholas Hilliard, the most celebrated portraitist of her reign. A PhD from the Warburg Institute followed, for a thesis on Elizabethan portraiture and court culture, written under the supervision of the great Renaissance scholar Dame Frances Yates.

First as assistant keeper (1959–67) and director (1967–73) of the National Portrait Gallery and then as director of the V&A (1973–87), Strong devoted the better part of 30 years to pioneering exhibitions and publications on all things Elizabethan (with occasional forays back to Henry VIII’s reign and forwards to the early Stuarts). The next 30 years saw him branch out, with the publication of his indiscreet Diaries, with their fly-on-the-wall accounts of, among other things, his years at the NPG and the V&A, together with histories of a dizzying array of topics: gardens, grand eating, the coronation ritual and the English country church, to name just a few. Now, aged 84, Strong has come full circle, with a new book dedicated ‘To the Immortal Memory of Elizabeth I, Queen of England’.