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Gittings, Clare
1997.
The Changing Face of Death.
p.
19.
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II.—Sir Henry Unton and his Portrait: An Elizabethan Memorial Picture and its History*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2011
Extract
One of the strangest and best-known pictures in the National Portrait Gallery is that of Sir Henry Unton. He is depicted seated in a richly upholstered chair while around him there are grouped many extraordinary and wondrous scenes. We see him as a baby nursed by his mother; as a soldier accompanied by the panoply of war with tents, horse, armour, and attendant squires; on horseback, sun-shade in hand, riding through Italy, or escorted by trumpeters and servants into France. There are other scenes of banqueting, masquing, and revelry; but the mirth of festival gives way to counsel with learned divines and the solitude of study. There are also more sombre tableaux: a death-bed surrounded by weeping and praying ser-vants and a hearse draped in black being jogged through the bleak English countryside, while beggar women and children, the blind and lame, sit, grief-stricken, watching a gaunt procession of black-clad mourners. These are making their way towards a steepled church to the left, where a large congregation listens attentively to a sermon and before which there stands a splendid tomb, gaily tricked out in scarlet, black, and gold, on which there lies the recumbent effigy of a knight presided over by a lady attired in widow's weeds. All these relate in some way to the subject of the picture, Sir Henry Unton; in correct sequence they form a selective visual biography, and in this way the picture has value not only as a record of the sitter's features but as a unique historical document (pl. xxvi).
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References
1 The only previous study of the picture is Emden's, C. S. ‘Sir Henry Unton (1557–96), An Elizabethan Story Picture’, Oriel Papers, Oxford, 1948, pp. 1–8.Google Scholar
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1 There is no full-length biography of Sir Henry Unton. The best account is in the D.N.B., s.v. Unton. Summaries are in Wood, A. à, Athenae Oxonienses, London, 1813, i, 647–8Google Scholar; The Unton Inventories, ed. Nichols, J. G., Berkshire Ashmolean Society, 1841, pp. L–Lxvii.Google Scholar
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2 P.R.O., S.P. 78/9, no. 110; Cal. S.P. Foreign, 1583–4, p. 657, are both on this theme.
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8 Unton to Sir Robert Cecil, 20th January 1594/5, Hist. MSS. Comm., Hatfield, v, 93.
9 He is listed as a J.P. in 1592, Acts of the Privy Council, 1592, p. 259; Deputy Lieutenant for Berkshire in 1593, Ibid., 1592–3, p. 31.
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1 Collins, Letters and Memorials, i, 382.
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1 The doctor's account of Unton's death is in P.R.O., S.P. 78/37, f. 119.
2 Quoted, Cheyney, History of England, p. 130.
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5 Ibid. iv. 493.
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