Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger – Flemish painter
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561-1636)
Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger is a Flemish painter. He spent his early years in Bruges (Belgium), where his father, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (c. 1525 – before 1591), worked as an artist.
At the age of seven, he moved with his family to London.
Having moved to England, Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger painted in his father’s studio, half of which belonged to the artist Isaac Oliver, and subsequently achieved considerable success as a portrait painter at the court of Elizabeth I and James I.
Compared to the strained and formal images in his father’s canvases, his portraits are more realistic, but nevertheless they carefully depict the smallest details and draperies of fabrics.
Gheeraerts received work at the English court, where he painted portraits and did decorative work. He was the most respected and most fashionable portraitist in the 1590s under Queen Elizabeth and James I, but fell out of favour with James’s wife Anne after 1617. Gheeraerts died on 19 January 1636 in London.
