Portrait of a Woman, probably Mary, Lady Scudamore

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, 1561–1635, Flemish, active in Britain (from 1568), Portrait of a Woman, probably Mary, Lady Scudamore, 1601

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Creator:: Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, 1561–1635
Title:: Portrait of a Woman, probably Mary, Lady Scudamore
Former Title(s):: A Woman Called Eleanor, Lady Scudamore [1985, Cormack, YCBA Concise Catalogue]
Date:: 1601
Medium:: Oil on panel
Dimensions:: 44 3/4 x 33 inches (113.7 x 83.8 cm)
Inscription(s)/Marks/Lettering:: Dated in brown paint, upper left: "1601"
Credit Line:: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:: Public Domain
Accession Number:: B1975.1.9
Classification:: Paintings
Collection:: Paintings and Sculpture
Link to Frame:: B1975.1.9FR
Subject Terms:: black | costume | gloves | jewelry | portrait | Tudor | woman
Associated People:: Scudamore [née Shelton], Mary, Lady Scudamore (c.1550–1603), courtier
Access:: Not on view
Link:: https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:200
Export:: XML
IIIF Manifest:: JSON

This cannot be Ursula Pakington (d. 1558), the wife of William Scudamore of Holme Lacy, Herefordshire. Nor can it be the first wife of their son, the courtier Sir John Scudamore (1542-1623), Eleanor Croft (d. 1569), whom he married in 1563. But it could be Sir John's second wife, Mary, the daughter of Sir John Shelton of Norfolk. The Scudamores married in January 1574. Lady Scudamore was a member of the queen's privy chamber, and known at court as "a barbarous, brazen-faced woman." Mysteriously, the arrow-head pendant is a conspicuous emblem not of the Sheltons or Scudamores, but of the Sidney family.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2005

Malcolm Cormack, Concise Catalogue of Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1985, pp. 102-103, N590.2 A83 (YCBA) [YCBA]

List of Pictures at Holme Lacy, Co. Hereford, Taken by Joseph Gulston, in 1785, The Gentleman's Magazine, Vol XCV, July - Dec. 1825, pp. 134-135, Available online in Brit. Peridicals II Databas Also avalbel in hard cooy or on Microfilm at SML and BRBL [ORBIS]

Diana Scarisbrick, Jewellery in Tudor and Jacobean Portraits at New Haven, Apollo, v. 126, no. 309, November 1987, pp. 323-333, N1 A54 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Roy C. Strong, The English icon, Elizabethan & Jacobean portraiture , Paul Mellon Foundation for British Art, London New York, 1969, p. 292, ND1314 S77 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Ian Tyers, The tree-ring analysis of 23 panel paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , New Haven, dendrochronological consultancy report 470 , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 2011, pp. 13, 16, 52-54, 85, fig. 28, CC78.3 .T94 2011 [ORBIS]

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