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- [00:00]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad Free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe. Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors. To get all History Hit podcasts ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe and you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.
- [00:49]
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- [01:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors.
- [02:24]
Emma Rutherford
If I were to ask you to name the top artists of the Tudor.
- [02:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Court, I suspect that those that would first leap to mind would be Hans.
- [02:33]
Emma Rutherford
Holbein, Nicholas Hilliard, perhaps Isaac Oliver and Lucas Horenboot. They would, in other words, all be men. But new research is starting to reveal that not only were there women artists painting the Tudors, but they were probably more active than we have hitherto known.
- [02:49]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Today we're going to be talking about two of them. Susannah Horenboot, an artist operating at Henry VIII's court, and Lavina Teelink, who began.
- [02:57]
Emma Rutherford
Her career under Catherine Parr and flourished under Elizabeth I. And we're going to be delving deep into a new discovery. A miniature of Lady Mary, Princess Mary, later Mary I, that can only have been painted by Susannah Horemboot.
- [03:13]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Susannah Horenboot or Horenbout and Lavinia Teerlink.
- [03:17]
Emma Rutherford
Were not only alike in being Tudor court painters, both were Flemish, both were trained by renowned artistic fathers. There, though the similarities end. Their careers were very different, as was their artistic style. To explore their lives and work and to break the news of her discovery, I'm delighted to be joined again on the podcast by Emma Rutherford, a freelance art historian who specializes in portrait miniatures and silhouettes. It was she who discovered the cabinet portrait of Lady Arbella Stewart by Nicholas Hilliard. Her clients include Philip Moore & Co.
- [03:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And the National Portrait Gallery. And she runs the Lima Company, which.
- [03:57]
Emma Rutherford
Researches and sells antique portrait miniatures. She's joined today by Alan Derbyshire Cloud.
- [04:03]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And medal winning portrait miniatures expert and.
- [04:06]
Emma Rutherford
Head of conservation at the V and A on miniatures until his recent retirement.
- [04:11]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors.
- [04:18]
Emma Rutherford
Alan, Emma, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much, Emma, for coming back and Alan for joining us for the first time. It's a really exciting topic. We've got to talk about starting New Year's. So we're going to talk first about Susannah Horenboot, or people might know her by a variation of that surname, Hornbolt sometimes is what said, or her brother Lucas or her father Gerard. Who was she, first of all? What do we know about her?
- [04:45]
Alan Derbyshire
We know that she was born around 1502, something like that, and her father Gerard was a very, very famous manuscript illuminator. And one of the earliest times we come across her, and specifically in the context of her as an artist, is when she meets Albrecht Jurer in Antwerp in 1521. And he says she is around 18 years old. So this helps give us a rough date of her birth. And he's incredibly impressed by her work and he says more or less in translation, it is very wonderful that a woman can do so much. And he actually buys from her a small illuminated trinity. So this is just a really extraordinary exchange because Jura came to fame also as a teenager and we're not sure whether he's commenting on her gender or her age in this context, but certainly he's really, really impressed by this teenage artist. And then we think she comes over almost certainly with her brother Lucas, possibly also with her father Gerard, to England in the mid-1520s. But before that, the family are very strongly aligned with Margaret of Austria. And of course, at this point, there are great connections between the courts of Margaret of Austria and Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. There are family connections which I won't go into now, but I'm sure your listeners will know all about, and you certainly will. So what you've got here is a family, a father and two children who are artists. There's a larger family as well, moving to England possibly at Henry VIII's specific request, and really staying in England and producing certainly illuminated manuscripts and portrait miniatures, really at the very birth of the portrait miniature in the 1520s. So it's very exciting. But Susanna is in there and she is sort of. She's sort of equal almost to father and brother in terms of things like payments and reputation.
- [06:52]
Emma Rutherford
So interesting that we have the connection between Margaret or Marguerite of Austria, as you say, Catherine of Aragon's former sister in law, great friend. We also have Anne Boleyn spending time at Margaret Vostra's court. So these two women are both encountering potentially via Marguerite, a great illuminator in the form of Gerard Horemboot and therefore possibly connected to the Horemboots when they're in England. You mentioned the miniature arriving England. When does it come to England?
- [07:25]
Alan Derbyshire
Well, the earliest portrait miniature thought to have been painted in England is the portrait of Princess Mary, which is in the National Portrait Gallery and was recently on show for the Six Lives exhibition there. And it shows Princess Mary has to have been painted by 1525 because she's wearing a little brooch which says emperor, a shortened version of emperor, and it's to do with her betrothal to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. I'm writing saying, I think Catherine of Aragon's nephew. So again, another connection, and we don't know exactly who painted this miniature at the moment, and in the exhibition it was called the Horenbach family workshop. But this is certainly the earliest portrait mention the fact she's wearing this emperor brooch met Princess Mary's around nine years old in this image. That emperor brooch really gives us a date for it or a very short date span for it. So, yes, 1521-25, that's the earliest English miniature.
- [08:25]
Emma Rutherford
This is the period of time when we have miniatures being produced of Henry VIII himself and then of Catherine of Aragon. And it sort of makes sense that these would be at the same time as their daughter. And one of the clues, I suppose, in terms of identifying the dates is that one of the miniatures of the king says annoitatis trigunte quinque in his 35th year, that is age 34. So we could put it between 28 June 1525 and 27 June 1526. So interestingly that actually, if it is the same time as Mary, then we're pushing it into 1525. But when it comes to thinking about those miniatures of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon and Mary, how do we know about authorship? Can we identify works unarguably by Susanna's hand? How sure can we be that they're not Lucas, or can we tell the difference between them?
- [09:20]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
To answer your question, I don't think we can actually and distinguish between who may have painted those miniatures. The kind of construction of miniature at that time, the painting of them was quite generic. So you're not going to see differences that we can technically differentiate between. In terms of pigments. For example, I would imagine Susanna and Lucas were painting in the same studio, maybe. So they've been using the same pigments and the same materials. So really it's a question of looking closely at the miniatures and the point that Emma was mentioning there just before the exhibition, the miniatures for the exhibition arrived at the mpg and a few of us were invited informally to have a look at them all together, which is fantastic. But we couldn't but clearly see who could have painted each of the miniatures. What we could see there were two or three different hands from the way they were painted from this style. And that's about as far as you can go, really. I think there's been a lot of work done on the technical analysis of portrait miniatures. I did some at the V and A with my colleague Lucius and also the Hamilton Carr University. There's been some work done. A fantastic resource have been created by Christine Kimbriel and her colleagues. Where you can go in, you can look at lots of the different miniatures and all the different techniques they've used to analyze them. Polly Saltmarsh did some work at Yale on a miniature thought to be by Warren Horrible. But we can't clearly say this is by Lucas or this is by Susanna. But I think because we know there are different hands involved, by looking at them, we can start to talk about the Hornbrook family rather than them all being by Lucas, which would have been said, you know, 20, 30 years ago.
- [11:00]
Alan Derbyshire
I think there's just one other point here in how Lucas is described in the documents at the time, which is as the King's painter, he's not described as an illuminator or limner, whereas we know that Dura Bought from Susanna A. Limning. And we. And we're not entirely sure when Gerard arrives in England either. We know his wife dies in 1529 and is buried Fulham of all places, where the family home was. But it's interesting that Lucas is not described as perhaps somebody who is producing illuminations or portrait miniatures. So although traditionally and perhaps in that sort of wonderful historical sexist way, these portraits of Henry have always been given to Lucas. It's just as possible that they are.
- [11:45]
Emma Rutherford
By Susanna for the sake of non art historians. Listening when we talk about being able to identify different hands in the miniatures, what does that actually mean?
- [11:57]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
How can different hands mean who actually painted the miniature?
- [12:01]
Emma Rutherford
Yes, but how can you see it?
- [12:03]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
Well, how can you see it? It's a good question. I mean, a lot of it is just by looking and comparing. And when you have the opportunity to put several miniatures next to each other that previous have all been thought, have been said by Lucas on a boat. You can see differences in the way that paint is applied. You can see differences in the way that the eyes are painted or the way the nose is painted. Often I think artists have a particular way, a generic way of painting a part of the face. And you see it throughout history, art history, that if you see enough of the miniatures together or painted together, you begin to see there's a certain way, you know, Lavina Teeling is a good example or the supposed earth of Lavina Teeling. Gotta be careful what we say about that. There are certain approaches to the face, like the eyes are quite puffy, the mouth is quite puckered and very red, the lips. But in terms of the application to paint, which is another thing, the paint tends to be painted in kind of a washy way. You don't see very distinct brushstrokes. You don't see hatching or stippling. It's quite a washy, ambiguous way of applying the paint. And I think that's quite distinct when you look at her work, when you look at Lucas Hornibolt's work, and they've often been kind of confused or talked about in the same breath. When you look at the hornable miniatures, you see a more kind of structure. You get a sense of the bone structure underneath the flesh and you see individual strokes. And those are the things which are defined the hand of the artist, I guess. I mean, it's quite clear. When you say see a Holbein miniature, then you have a much greater quality evident in the painting. You can see that he really does understand the structure of the skull. Beneath the skin. And that's when it goes onto a different level, I think.
- [14:05]
Emma Rutherford
So it's as if we have fingerprints in artistic terms. We have fingerprints over each of these miniatures. We just don't know whose prints are whose.
- [14:15]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
So we need to find a baseline. We need to say, okay, we're clear from art historical evidence that this particular miniature was painted by Susanna. If we knew that, then we can bring in the rest of the earths and see whether they correspond to that hand that we're talking about. The way the paint is applied, the pigments will probably be very similar, you know, from the 16th century. The pigments and the actual making of the image are all going to be very, very similar indeed. But you might see differences in the way the paint is applied.
- [14:45]
Emma Rutherford
Okay, so we're on search for that touchstone.
- [14:48]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
Yeah.
- [14:49]
Emma Rutherford
What about Susan James argument that there are different monograms for Lucas and Sisella? Do you make it?
- [14:57]
Alan Derbyshire
I've read a little bit about that. I mean, that would be very neat and very helpful. But on a very basic level, I physically can't see them. I think on this scale, artists are very deliberate and they are working whether they're drawing a flower or a jewel. It's quite incredible when Alan and I look at these miniatures under a microscope, how a jewel, which to the naked eye you can. It looks like just a blob when you get it under the microscope. The construction is three dimensional. There's resin, there's actual powdered silver paint, there's body color. I think to suggest that there's something really hidden there is not particularly plausible to me. But that is just my opinion. I mean, you were saying a bit, talking about sort of fingerprints of artists almost. And perhaps we should talk a little bit about the apprenticeship as well and how these techniques and styles were passed on. Because the other surprising thing, in a way, is how different artists don't really follow their masters. So a master Lucas is meant to have taught Holbein to paint the art of illumination and the art of painting portrait miniatures. But if we accept that there's a body of work by the Hornbau family workshop, it doesn't really relate to the quality of their pupil, as it were, in terms of Holbein and Alan can probably talk a little bit more about that and also about the calligraphy, that probably is where we are looking at more of a sort of handwriting signifier for individual artists.
- [16:31]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
I think that's a good point. We often. I mean, you see, there were saying before about Holbein, the quality of his miniatures being far exceeding the quality of the miniatures by Horneworth. But even someone like Holbein would have had to learn the various techniques of creating a portrait miniature, because it's not obvious just by looking at them how the paint is applied, how the actual matrix of the tablets, the vellum, portrait matrix at that time were painted on vellum. But the vellum was extremely thin. So if we compare it to illuminated manuscripts, you're using much thicker piece of parchment, so it doesn't need a secondary support. But the valve that's used for portrait miniatures is incredibly fine. Hilliard talks about it being taken from abortive calves, so her follicles haven't had time to grow. So the vellum is very smooth. And that would have been stuck down onto a card, probably a playing card, because they were commercially available. So that's the base from which you're starting. But then to actually build up the layers of the miniature, the first thing is to apply a carnation, which is the flesh color of the pigment of the face. And that's applied to the surface of the vellum. And then you can outline the body, you can capture the likeness of the sitter on the carnation. And once you've done that, you can then remove the excess carnation. You can paint in the hair, you can paint in the blue background, you can paint in the clothes. So these are all kind of quite. You don't see that just by looking at a miniature. So Holbein would have had to been taught these things, even though he then excelled, is the person who taught him. And I think we can see a similar thing, perhaps with thinking that maybe Teelink taught Hilliard how to paint. That's quite feasible, even though Hilliard far exceeded tear link in terms of quality of how she painted. But he would have had to know how to paint a miniature, how to construct the miniature. And likewise, later on, Hilliard teaches Oliver how to paint miniatures, even though Oliver was a very accomplished artist. So there's something very arcane and hidden about the painting of miniatures. When I was at the V and A working with students, we would have a kind of a triple attack on these things. We would read the manuscripts that were available, we would actually look at the miniatures and we'd also use reconstruction. So we would try to reconstruct the way miniatures were painted, try to reconstruct some of those techniques which aren't obvious. It's only then that you realize a the amazing skill of the artist, but how difficult it was to actually achieve what we are looking at and then you begin to think actually did they use magnification, for example? Because when you think about some of the detail, it's incredible. But when we're looking at like the painting of the rubies that Emma mentioned, the painting of the resin, which is placed on a silver base and that resin can't be painted, it's a sticky substance like varnish. You have to use a hot needle to place it onto the silver base. But Hilliard doesn't say exactly how he painted that in his treatise. It was only through reconstruction that we found that when you place the resin onto the silver base, it becomes quite kind of, you get a little peak of the resin, but you can place that peak, that miniature, in front of a source of heat of fire and the peak will re globulize into a little round perfect ruby.
- [19:53]
Alan Derbyshire
That's a very interesting question. It's not something I've actually thought about before. I suppose portrait miniatures are seen by far fewer people. They're a one to one experience. So I suppose in that way they're creating quite a different image of the King. I mean people are always surprised when I put a slide up of a horn bolt miniature of Henry, perhaps like the one you mentioned in his 35th year where he doesn't have a beard. But then you have Holbein creating the power image of Henry as well as these incredibly delicate miniatures of people like Anne of Cleves. So I think Holbein was just one of those artists who was just so incredibly adaptable and brilliant, a genius and they don't come along very often. But I think he's also perhaps more akin to that sort of Protestant secular image of Henry that is very different to the more religious images that we get of him as the God given King. But it's a question I haven't been asked for. So quite like to think about that perhaps a little bit more.
- [20:56]
Emma Rutherford
What do we know about Susanna's life from the documentary evidence while she's in England?
- [21:02]
Alan Derbyshire
Well, intriguingly so she comes over unmarried and she marries somebody who would have been very, very useful for her, a gentleman with a surname of Parker. He was actually in charge of wardrobe, the royal wardrobe. So if she is the person who's painting these portraits, obviously you're not necessarily going to get a member of the royal family to sit for you hour after hour, day after day. So to have access to the royal clothing. And we know that later Hilliard is one of the few people who has access to the royal jewel house of Elizabeth. That's Very, very useful. But John Parker has a very, very high position at Henry's court. So they are courtiers and they are extremely highly regarded. They serve several monarchs. Susanna is briefed to go and bring Anne of Cleves. She's part of the entourage. You bring Anne of Cleves back to England. And of course, this is partly pragmatic because she will speak the same language as Anne of Cleves, who we know didn't speak English, said, she's not just an artist, she is very much a gentlewoman and she is incredibly close to the court. Just going back a little bit to Susan E James point about there being perhaps a sort of signature, written signature or monogram on these miniatures. I think we have to think a little bit about the fame of these artists at this time. So Jarrod Hornbolt, father of Susanna, and Simon Benning, the father of Lavina Teerlink, have international fame. It's very hard to describe what level of fame that they would have had. And they would have, you know, the court would have been very, very grateful to have enticed them to England rather than another European court getting hold of them. So I think at the time, frustratingly, everybody would have sort of known who painted these. But as Alan's explained, it's now we're getting there, but, yeah, it's now quite confused.
- [23:14]
Matt Lewis
I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yo. And in God Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History, Hit on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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- [25:05]
Emma Rutherford
When it comes to looking at other miniatures from the 1520s up into the 1540s, even 1550s, can we see the same diversity of hands?
- [25:17]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
There are certainly several artists painting who's handy, who belongs to a particular artist is what we're talking about. Unless you have that touchstone miniature that you can then work from, it's pretty difficult to say, well this must be by a certain artist. And I think we have to be careful not to fall into that trap, which I think previous people have where they've wanted to put a miniature to an artist. It's okay, I think, to say it's unknown. I think there's this kind of obsession with saying we need to know who was the author, which is great to know, but we can't always know at this stage, I don't think.
- [25:51]
Emma Rutherford
And one possible way of doing that would be to know when people lived. Didn't Lucas Horenbut die early in the 1540s?
- [26:02]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
Yeah, he died around the same time as Holbein. 1547, wasn't it?
- [26:06]
Alan Derbyshire
Yeah, slightly earlier. He dies in 1544. But yes, that is quite useful and one of the most intriguing things I know that we haven't moved on to Lavena Teerlink yet, but is there is there's a gap of about three decades between Holbein and Lucas Hornbolt dying. Gerard has died even earlier and Nicholas Hilliard's earliest miniatures in the very early 1570s where certainly based on costume miniatures were being produced. But you do have this hiatus of a very long time between artists that we really know a lot about.
- [26:43]
Emma Rutherford
Which brings us to your new discovery. As listeners may know from the press, you have discovered a miniature of who you think to be Mary tudor. Mary the first as she will become from the late 1540s. Tell us about it and why you think this might be by Susannah Horenboot.
- [27:07]
Alan Derbyshire
So I have recently co curated an exhibition at Compton Verney and it's an exhibition which looks at at the whole history of miniatures and we had about a thousand miniatures to choose from, one a long term loan collection and another bequest to the house and the long term loan collection is a very uneven collection in terms of quality because it was collected by somebody who wanted to collect only miniatures that were signed. But there are very, as we've been discussing, very, very few signed miniatures from this early period. So the collector had to be content with buying a miniature of a woman, a circular miniature of a woman which had traditionally been called Catherine Parr and had been given to Lucas Horembolt. And when I came to curate the exhibition and obviously start to write the labels and a little while ago now, and I'd been looking obviously at the Six Lives exhibition and the new work that had been done on Royal family of Henry viii and realized that this miniature, although traditionally called Catherine Parr, looked much, much more like Mary Tudor. And it's a sort of rule of thumb, especially art historians dealing with portraiture, that you don't go by simply how people looked because that's a really bad place to start. But Mary Tudor did have a very, very distinctive face. She had this very wide nose, she had bright blue eyes, she had auburn hair. There's enough pictorial evidence to be able to really understand what she looked like, her physiognomy. And we decided that let's start to investigate this as Mary I. And I think this miniature of Mary, it's painted around 1544-6. So it's around the time that her brother has died, her father is long dead, Lavina Teelink, we have her really starting to paint from the sort of more the early 1550s. It seemed to be everything pointing to the fact that Susanna, who is part of Mary's household at this date and is gifted by Mary a 12 yards of black satin. I think people at Mary's court were meant to wear black satin. And I've been working with Owen Emerson, I think you know, as well, who's a Tudor historian who's dated her French hood. And with Nicola Tallis, the portrait miniature of who we think is Mary is wearing a cross. And we found a very, very specific description of a cross that was given to Mary by Henry VIII before his death, obviously which matches exactly the cross that Mary is wearing in this miniature. But because she's almost the only miniaturist standing at in England who would have had access to Mary. And it would be the only image of Mary painted during her brother, half brother, Edward VI's reign, we may well have our first touchstone miniature by Susannah Hornbolt.
- [29:55]
Eva Longoria
Wow.
- [29:55]
Emma Rutherford
So given what we've said, this discovery could be the beginning of really starting to understand Susannah Hornbuch's. Work.
- [30:03]
Alan Derbyshire
Yeah, it could. Normally you don't sort of as a historian, you don't start talking about discoveries until you've really, really looked into them. And this has come together very quickly. But I mean I think because it's been unresearched, it wasn't in the Six Lives exhibition, it hasn't been seen in public, this miniature. So it's a pretty under researched object. I'm hoping to bring in more historians and people like Alan, who hasn't had it under a microscope yet, to really start to understand it. And yeah, there's a little bit more about the provenance as well. It seems to have been in a collection with two miniatures of Catherine of Aragon, one in the National Portrait Gallery and one in a private collection and they were together at one point. There's a Sepia photograph from 1939 where they are together. I just need to find out who took it and where it was taken. So that's the next step in the research.
- [30:52]
Emma Rutherford
Well, thank you for sharing this work in progress and I can't wait to hear what Alan makes of it when he looks at it under the microscope and compares it to the other images.
- [31:01]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
I'm looking forward to. I've seen an image. Emma sent me an email recently with an image and I think it's a very good quality miniature. I think it's got a strength to it, which I really like. And it's very different from what you see with the so called Tear link miniatures which are very slight I think. And also I think this is by Susanna, which from the dates and things you're saying it probably is by her, I think calls into question some of the better quality miniatures that have been previously given to Lucas. So it could be that Susannah was the the star in that kind of family of nature painters.
- [31:35]
Emma Rutherford
How very exciting.
- [31:36]
Alan Derbyshire
Kira is praising her when she's just 18 and actually giving her his own money for a work of art. Then we can assume she was pretty talented.
- [31:47]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
Yeah, it's a lovely miniature that is.
- [31:50]
Emma Rutherford
Very exciting and we should be watching this space. Please do come back to us.
- [32:05]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors to get all History hit podcasts ad free, early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe and you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.
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- [33:05]
Emma Rutherford
We also want to talk today about her successor, sort of generation later in birth date. From what we can tell, Lavena or La Levine. There's various spellings of her full name thanks to Tudor autography. Teelink, what could we know about her biography?
- [33:27]
Alan Derbyshire
So she is probably born and again we don't have an exact date, around seven to 10 years later than Susannah Hornbolt. So she's slightly younger than her. And she arrives in England already married to Teerlink George Teelink and her father is Simon Benning who is a Flemish illuminator. Very, very famous Flemish illuminator. So she's got a very, very similar background to Susanna Horenbach. And I don't think there would be any doubt that their paths would have crossed because they are at court at the same time, they are working for the same monarchs. There's sort of various periods of time when Lavina possibly was out of the country, but she lives a very long time. She doesn't die until 1576. So she crosses over with Nicholas Hilliard in terms of his earliest miniature is from, we think 1571. There hasn't been an earlier miniature found. There's some Juvenalia, but that's very contentious. So it's possible that she taught Hilliard, but it's rather odd that he doesn't mention her at all. We have this treatise written by Hilliard. It's not ever published but it's. And we have a few copies of it. So it's a very, very useful document. He mentions all sorts of artists in that treatise but he doesn't mention Teerlink. This is quite odd because her father again had an extraordinary level of fame and you would think that Hilliard would have liked to have been linked to the famous Simon Benning, her father. But she's not mentioned. Interestingly, unlike Susanna, she is specifically called in the royal document. She is called a paintrix, she's called painter. She is an artist and she is being paid as an artist. So she has an official salary which starts in 1546 and she's paid £40 a year and she seems to have been connected to the court via the sister of Catherine Parr, Council of Pembroke. So she's entering courtly life at a very, very high level. And she is being paid more than Holbein, who is being paid around 34 pounds a year. So we've again got this slightly odd dichotomy between somebody who's being paid a lot of money and who is clearly a really, really highly regarded member of the court. But we don't have the physical object that seemed to sort of relate to that status that is clear and the monetary value that's connected with her.
- [35:55]
Emma Rutherford
And what happens to her after Henry VIII's death. You say she lives up until the 1570s. So what's her status?
- [36:03]
Alan Derbyshire
Yeah, well, she gets attached to various courts and there are all sorts of mentions of her. She produces quite a lot of work that's given as gifts, less commissions, which is quite important. She's at that level where she's exchanging gifts. She's really at every single court. I think there is a bit of a hiatus where she's possibly out of the country for a little while. She has children like Susannah Hornbolt, but she's also naturalized, as are the. The Hornbolts. So they're clearly. They're very connected to this country and honored to be working for the royal family here. But she has a very international reputation as well. And Clovio's inventory of 1578, he owns a portrait in a round box by Teelink where he mentions her as miniaturist to the Queen of England. So we talk about Hilliard as Elizabeth I's great image maker, but it seems like Teelink was likely their first and internationally recognized as somebody who was producing portraits of Elizabeth I in the earlier part of her reign.
- [37:09]
Emma Rutherford
And Alan, you gave us a sense earlier of some of the sort of hallmarks of Teelink's style. The puffy eyes, the puckered lips, the application of paint without hatching and that sort of thing. When you look at her portraits today, how many survive by comparison to what we know might have survived? And when we look at some of the sort of disputed pictures, I'm thinking of things like the roses miniature of 1572. How can we decide authorship?
- [37:38]
Dr. Eleanor Yo
A million dollar question. There's probably less than 10 trips it to tear link. I guess it's as we said before, we look at the way the paint is applied, really, we look at those characteristics which I think I put as with a certain artist, like the washi application of the paint. Another thing is the ones I've seen, there are a few at the V and A. The whites of the eye tend to Have a blue tone to them, a blue color to them, which is interesting. And the eyes, the pupils of the eyes tend not to have a white highlight. So those are a couple of things which I think, to me, distinguish teething from others potential artists. But again, I think, you know, what we really need to do is get lots of money together and get all these miniatures in one room and just look and compare and through the microscope. I mean, there's a lot of technical arts out there nowadays. We know the pigments. That's fine. And we know that there's a kind of a change in the use of pigments like the carnation, which is usually a lead white with a touch of red. At the time of Hornerbolt and Tearlink, it tends to be vermilion. The red pigment later on it becomes red lead. So we can see those kind of patterns. But generally speaking, that's not going to help us that much. So I think we just need to look, and we need to look very closely through the microscope and look for those distinguishing features. Maybe we need to get AI involved and get them to AI to really analyze brushstrokes. Once we can get a group together, that's the kind of thing you need to do to actually scientifically have a better understanding and be able to group these things into one hand at least, and then use art history to say, well, who. Which artists were alive at that time? Who was working for the court at that time? And then we put a name to that hand. Maybe that's the way to do it.
- [39:35]
Emma Rutherford
Susan James has raised the possibility again. And I think it's really important that people raise these, you know, options so that they can be investigated. The two of Elizabeth I's most famous portraits, the Phoenix and the Pelican, are by Teelink. How does that sit with you?
- [39:52]
Alan Derbyshire
I mean, I think we've only just become confident with Hilliard branching out and painting oils. I don't think I would want to entirely dismiss that. But I think that the Hilliard oil miniatures, particularly the most recent discovery of the two at Waddesdon, and the amount of scientific investigation that's gone into those to come to the conclusion that they are most likely by Nicholas Hilliard. I wouldn't really want to comment until these had gone through the same process, really. I think Susan James has done some amazing work, probably more work than anybody. But I think there's such a desire to have this physical evidence of these women. And it's frustrating when you look back through the books and you see Teerlink's work being grouped into an oeuvre that's then described as really weak or unskilled or the physiognomy is wrong. I think Roy Strong is quite dismissive of her as an artist. The answer is we still don't know what she was like as an artist. And the written mentions of her and the accolades that she's receiving and the money that she's receiving just don't match with the current oeuvre of work that's given to her. So I applaud Susan James for sort of reaching higher for this artist and looking at higher quality works as potentially by her, but I think we're still a little way off that, so who knows?
- [41:16]
Emma Rutherford
And is it possible to say from what survives how influential her work might have been on the development of the Queen's image?
- [41:27]
Alan Derbyshire
I think it depends how closely we can connect her to Hilliard and at the moment. Yeah, well, Hilliard very much kept Stumm on that, but he kept, you know, he was very secretive about a lot of things about his career and his practice and particularly his tuition. You know, he. He basically says he's. He's more or less self taught and he's just looked at miniatures by Holbein, which Alan will tell you is not possible. So I think without knowing, I mean, we know that Elizabeth had very, very high regards for Lavina Teeling. She pays off the debts that Mary owes her in full. She pays £150 over to her on Mary's death and her annuity continues after lavina's death in 1576 to her family. So she's a really, really highly valued member of the court. But until we can really say for certain which portraits of Elizabeth are by her, we can't really talk about how she shaped the Queen's image. We just know she was a really important member of the court.
- [42:27]
Emma Rutherford
It seems so curious, doesn't it, that we've got Susannah Horenboot's work, which appears, if you're correct, in identifying this Mary Tudor and the other possibilities as being really excellent, and yet we don't see much recognition of that in the, say, payments or in the documentary sources. And then we've kind of got the inverse situation for Tealing. It's very curious, I wonder, as we conclude, to think about what difference gender has made in terms of their reputations in their lifetime and the information we've had about them. And why are we just starting to really ask these questions about these women artists?
- [43:13]
Alan Derbyshire
Well, I mean, it's definitely part of a wider initiative for want of a better word, in looking at women artists. And certainly you have books like Katie Hessel's book History Of Art Without Men. And so there's definitely a rebalance going on in art history and that's very exciting. And yes, these women have definitely been left out of the secondary sources, but what I'd really like to do is to find out a little bit more about the status of women at this point as artists and the status of female illuminators and painters. There's a massive difference at this date between artisans and craftsmen and artists. And I think we're so excited by anything from the Tudor period. We think it's all so wonderful that it survived, that we don't necessarily talk about quality or status of the artist in terms of portraiture. So, yeah, there's certainly the fact that they were both women is commented on in their lifetimes. The fact that they are women is definitely. That is drawn out about them as though they are special, they are women in a man's world. But I don't know that it really. I wouldn't want to say that it had a detrimental effect on their careers, possibly even the opposite.
- [44:27]
Emma Rutherford
So perhaps it is only we who are slowly catching up with the reality of the Tudor artistic life. Well, thank you both so very much. Thank you, Emma, for once again bringing one of your discoveries, this wonderful work in progress, to not just the Tudors. We really appreciate that. And Alan, thank you so much for your contributions. Can't wait to hear more of your thoughts on this. Thank you both.
- [44:52]
Alan Derbyshire
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.
- [44:55]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History hit. Also thanks to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. If you enjoyed this episode, then I think you'll be fascinated by an episode titled A Tudor the Girl who Could Be Queen, in which Emma Rutherford and Dr. Elizabeth Goldring set out to solve the 400-year-old mystery of a previously unknown portrait of a young woman dressed to look just like Queen Elizabeth herself. Another Tudor mystery we unraveled was in the episode titled who Painted Anne Dudley? And we devoted episodes to Elizabeth I's favourite painter, Nicholas Hilliard, and several to the mighty Hans Holbein. Do check them out. The links are in the show notes for this episode. We're always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at Not Just the tudors@historyhit.com or on X for formerly Twitter otjusttutors Remember, you can also listen to all of these podcasts on YouTube and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe it's well worth it. And if you would be so good as to follow not just the Tudors on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
- [46:30]
Eva Longoria
Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez Rejon. Our podcast Hungry for History is and this season we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history, seeing that the most popular cocktail is the Margarita, followed by the Mojito from Cuba and the pina colada from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for history on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [47:02]
Ryan Reynolds
Listen to this acast show ad free on Amazon Music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.