This rare and intimate Elizabethan portrait, dating from the 1580’s, depicts the head and shoulders of a wealthy merchant within a mottled-green painted circle.

In previous centuries in England, portraiture was almost exclusively confined to the nobility and it was not until the middle of the 16th century that there was a considerable rise in the commissioning of portraits by people lower down the social scale.

These new patrons, who are broadly categorised by Tarnya Cooper as the urban or middle elite, included wealthy merchants and successful member of the professional and artisanal classes, such as lawyers, physicians, scholars and goldsmiths. (see Cooper, T. Citizen Portrait: Portrait Painting and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales, London, (2012), p.1.).