Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561–1635-36)

• Was a Flemish artist working at the Tudor court.
• He was brought to England as a child by his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, also a painter.
• He became a fashionable portraitist in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I under the patronage of her champion and pageant-master Sir Henry Lee.
• He introduced a new aesthetic in English court painting that captured the essence of a sitter through close observation.
• He became a favorite portraitist of James I's queen Anne of Denmark, but fell out of fashion in the late 1610s.

• Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger was born in Bruges.

• Like other Protestant artists from the Low Countries, Gheeraerts the Elder fled to England with his son to escape persecution in the Low Countries under the Duke of Alba.

• Records suggest that Marcus was active as a painter by 1586.

• In 1590 he married Magdalena, the sister of his stepmother Susanna and of the painter John de Critz.

• The couple had six children, only two of whom seem to have survived—a son, Marcus III, also a painter, and a son Henry.

• His half-sister Sara married the painter Isaac Oliver.

• Next