Images(2)

Portrait: Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1552-1618)

Dateca. 1590

MediumOriginally, the oil portrait had a wood panel auxilliary support. (Edward O. Korany to John M. Graham, CWF, 2/26/1957, identifies the original panel as "oak"). Over the course of at least two different conservation treatments, the paint layer was removed from its original wood support and transferred to Masonite. The support is now Masonite, backed by wood cradling to prevent warpage.

DimensionsUnframed: 44 3/16 x 33 7/8in. (112.2 x 86cm) and Framed: 47 7/8 x 38in.

Credit LineGift of Sir Harold Harmsworth

Object number1938-197,A&B

DescriptionA three-quarter length portrait of a standing man wearing silver-colored body-armour, the breastplate ending in peascod fashion; rich brocaded short trunks, heavily embroidered with pearls, and plain white canions; rich baldric of silver braid embroidered with pearls; truncheon in proper right hand, proper left on hilt of the sword. On a cloth-covered table behind, a helmet with five large white feathers, set with jewels. Dark hair, ending on the chin in a peaked beard; high square forehead. Behind him is a tent, superimposed on which is a shield with the armorial bearings of Raleigh.
The 2 1/4-inch gilded cushion frame is a period replacement, but its source and date of addition are undocumented. A 1947 CWF photograph shows the painting in a different (wider black and gilded) frame. Probably The Old Print Shop, NY, NY, supplied the present cushion frame, for on 14 November 1952, OPS proprietor Harry Shaw Newman commented on the inappropriateness of the frame then on Raleigh's portrait and stated that he hoped to "secure matching frames for Sir Walter Raleigh and Lady Raleigh."

Label TextSir Walter Raleigh made a name for himself as a poet, solider, courtier, and explorer. Americans, however, best know him for his attempts to establish an English colony at Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina in 1584 and 1587. Both efforts failed, the second ending in the colonists' still unexplained disappearance. (A supply ship landing there in 1591 only found the word "CROATAN" carved on a tree trunk.) Nevertheless, Raleigh's errors and oversights helped guide the executors of the joint-stock Virginia Company, which succeeded in establishing the first permanent English colony in America at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607.
Another critical gain resulted from Raleigh's 1587 colonization attempt. John White accompanied the colonists but escaped the fate of the majority by being recalled to England relatively soon after landing. While in America, White capably sketched many indigenous plants, animals, and people, his remarkable images ultimately providing Europeans their first substantive visual record of life in the New World.
Colonial Williamsburg's portrait of Raleigh most likely predates his fall from Queen Elizabeth I's favor, which was precipitated by his unauthorized 1591 marriage to one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton. The opulence of Raleigh's jewel- and pearl-encrusted attire bespeaks royal favor, and his prominently displayed baton manifests authority. Superimposed on the canopy at upper left is a shield bearing the armorial bearings of Raleigh. For more than two centuries, the portrait hung at Knole, the estate in Kent, England, presented by Elizabeth I to her cousin, Thomas Sackville, and occupied by Sackville family descendants ever since.
Raleigh's checkered career included two terms of imprisonment in the Tower of London and two attempts to find "El Dorado," the fabled "City of Gold" believed to have been located in the Americas. King James I ordered Raleigh beheaded after the mercurial explorer ransacked a Spanish outpost at San Thomé in Guiana.

ProvenanceIn December 1929, Lord Sackville stated that this portrait and another (then supposed to be its companion, 1938-198; see "Notes") had been in the possession of the Sackville family at Knole for "just over 250 years." He appears to have believed that they were brought there, along with numerous other family furnishings, by Frances Cranfield, heiress of the last Earl of Middlesex, on the occasion of her marriage to Richard Sackville, 5th Earl of Dorest. This history has not been substantiated as of 5/14/2002.
However, acc. no. 1938-197 may well have been at Knole at least as early as 1731, in which year George Vertue commented on seeing a portrait of Raleigh there. The portrait he saw is generally believed to have been CWF's painting. See Cust and Strong ("Bibliography").
In the Guide Book on Knole published in 1876, CWF acc. nos. 1938-197 and 1938-198 were numbered 122 & 125, respectively, and were hanging in Lady Betty Germaine's Dressing Room. In the Guide Book on Knole published in 1913, the paintings were listed as numbers 246 & 247 and were hanging in the Cartoon Gallery [Lord Sackville's notes of December 1929]. The two paintings were purchased from Knole by Sir Leicester Harmsworth, presumably inherited by his son, Sir Harold Harmsworth, and given to CWF by the latter in 1938.