The oldest painting at Tate, surrounded by migrations
The room brings together court portraits painted between the last years of Henry VIII's reign and the reign of Charles I — nearly a century of Tudor and then Stuart dynasties told through the faces they had painted. Yet the room's guiding thread is not dynastic: it is migration. Most of the era's most sought-after court painters were immigrants from northern Europe, often having fled religious persecution.
This curatorial choice is visible even in the contemporary works placed among the older portraits: Exodus II, by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (2000), shows two leather suitcases joined by strands of human hair. Hatoum, whose family fled Palestine in 1948 before she herself was displaced by the Lebanese civil war in 1975, places here a contemporary object of exile amid four centuries of portraits painted by exiles of another era.
1. 1545: the oldest painting in the collection
A Man in a Black Cap, painted by John Bettes in 1545, is the oldest painting in Tate's entire collection. An inscription on the back of the oak panel states it was painted "in the year of our Lord 1545" and that the sitter was then twenty-six years old — but his identity remains unknown. The background, now a ginger-brown, was originally deep blue: Bettes used a pigment called smalt, made from ground glass, which has the property of irreversibly turning brown under the effect of light over the centuries.
Bettes's technique is so close to that of Hans Holbein the Younger — himself a German painter established in England as court portraitist to Henry VIII — that art historians believe he may have worked in his workshop. Two generations before the Flemish artists in this room, it was already a German who was defining the art of the portrait at the English court.
2. A family of painters who fled the Duke of Alba
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger arrives in England around 1568, aged six or seven, with his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder — one of thousands of Flemish Protestants then fleeing the Spanish Netherlands to escape the bloody persecution led by the Duke of Alba against defectors from Catholicism. As an adult, the son becomes one of the most sought-after portraitists of the closing years of Elizabeth I's reign, under the patronage of royal tournament master Sir Henry Lee, then favoured portraitist to Anne of Denmark, wife of James I.
Gheeraerts only obtains English naturalisation in 1618 — fifty years after arriving as a child refugee, and while he had been painting the royal family for decades. Look at the almost photographic precision of the lace and jewellery in his portraits: this is an eye trained in the Netherlands, applied to an entirely English clientele.
How much time
Take the time to spot Exodus II among the older portraits before stopping at the Bettes panel and the Gheeraerts portraits: it is this juxtaposition that gives the room its meaning.
- A Man in a Black Cap (Bettes, 1545) — 5 minutes.
- Portraits by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger — 8 minutes.
- Exodus II (Mona Hatoum) and the rest of the room — 10 minutes.
Sources and verification
Checked against Tate's collection pages (tate.org.uk) and cross-checked with Wikipedia EN/FR.
- Tate — A Man in a Black Cap, John Bettes
- Tate — Tudor and Stuart Technical Research, Unknown Man in a Black Cap
- Wikipedia EN — John Bettes the Elder
- Wikipedia EN — Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger
- Tate — Exodus 2, Mona Hatoum
- Tate — Exiles and Dynasties, display
Displays and room openings can change. Check the Tate Britain website on the day of your visit before following a route.
Listen to the commentary in the gallery
This route gives you a thread to follow. In front of an artwork, CulturAll adds the audio commentary: photograph the work or its label, listen, then ask your questions.
