To examine the portraits of Elizabeth I is to witness the creation of the legend of the Virgin Queen, of Gloriana and her burgeoning empire. The history of the portraiture is that of the deliberate manufacture of an image powerful enough to hold together a people divided by both rigid hierarchy and religious belief. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, her subjects had an all-too-vivid memory of military defeat and religious turmoil. Restoring stability to the kingdom involved the image of the Queen herself--over the years, she was transmuted from an elegant aristocrat into a cosmic vision. In Gloriana, Roy Strong provides a richly detailed analysis of all the major portraits.

Explores the long relationship between the celebrated photographer and the British royal family, offering insight into how his royal portraits shaped the monarchy's public image throughout the mid-20th century.

This is a photographic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, from her first official photograph as a baby in 1926 to her greeting President Obama at Buckingham Palace in 2009. Each chapter begins with a text by bestselling historian and biographer Philip Ziegler, covering the key royal and historical events of the period.

Fifty years after his seminal Tate gallery London exhibition, 'The Elizabethan Image', leading authority Roy Strong returns with fresh eyes to the subject closest to his heart, The Virgin Queen, her court and our first Elizabethan age From celebrated portraits of the Queen and paintings of knights and courtiers, to works depicting an aspiring 'middle class', Strong presents a detailed and authoritative examination of one of the most fascinating periods of British art. Enriching previous perceptions and ways of seeing the Elizabethans in their world, he reveals an age parallel in many ways to our own--a country aspiring professionally and changing socially. The gaze is from the inside, capturing the knights, melancholy lovers, poets (including Sidney, Donne and Sir John Davies), court favourites and their 'Gloriana'--as they mirrored and made themselves. Beginning with the great portrait of the Queen in grand procession with her Garter Knights, Strong pinpoints the characters and key motifs that run through the rest of the book: chivalry, changes to the social order, emblems and imagery - the full richness of the Elizabethan imagination. These pictures were intimate--personal commissions by private individuals, and not necessarily for public view. As such they are a glimpse into private worlds and sentiments and speak eloquently for the people who paid for, painted and lived amongst them, reversing an academic tendency to treat the portraits as if they had a life of their own, not grounded by the real people who commissioned them. Roy Strong concludes this richly illustrated volume with the famous and complex Rainbow Portrait, unpicking the iconography of this final painting of an ageless Elizabeth in her 'Mask of Youth'. Within a year of its completion the queen was dead--her portraits increasingly demoted and replaced by Mary Stuart's--as the splendour of the Elizabethan age and 'the cult of the queen' made way for new monarch James VI, who was to rule over a united England and Scotland.

A biography of Elizabeth I, Queen of England, from her troubled childhood through her forty year reign.