Date: 07-07-2002
Owning Institution: The National Portrait Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”    
Subject: Middle Ages & Earlier      

The so-called Unton Memorial, in the Tudor rooms of the National Portrait Gallery, is a thoroughly intriguing bad picture. A narratively ambitious, rather dark and quaintly intricate depiction of an Elizabethan gentleman’s birth, life and death, it was created to commemorate the funeral of one Sir Henry Unton, which took place on 8 July 1596. On the eve of this admittedly obscure anniversary, and in the optimistic but possibly futile hope of establishing it more firmly in the public mind, I have chosen his portrait as this week’s picture.

The Unton Memorial appears at first glance to seethe with complication but the underlying principles of its composition are fairly straightforward. At the pivotal point of the painting, just left of centre, a large portrait of Sir Henry Unton presides over a landscape in which his life, death and funeral rites unfold. He is shown writing at a table, which is probably an allusion to the prominent role which he had played in Elizabethan diplomacy; and he is flanked, above, by two allegorical figures: a skeleton signifying Death, who has now claimed him; and a winged, trumpeting personification of Fame, who promises to ensure that his good name and high reputation will persist into the future.

The same dualism of life and death, light and dark, governs the larger scheme of the picture. In the upper right-hand corner, the sun illuminates the daytime of Unton’s life and deeds, while in the corresponding place on the left side, a crescent moon sheds a somewhat fainter light on the scenes of his death. Under this night sky we see the church in which Unton was buried, his intricately carved tomb and the pinheaded, faceless congregation of those who have gathered to mourn his passing. The division between the two halves of the painting is marked, with poignancy, by the image of his coffin, beneath the table at which his larger self sits, leaving day and passing into night.

Altogether Unton appears more than a dozen times in the painting but the central image of him is by far the most commanding. Wearing an impressively heavy if rather cursorily depicted lace ruff, he stares out at posterity with sharp and piercing eyes. The anonymous artist responsible for the work has taken care to give him a ruddy complexion, indicative of a sanguine temperament, considered at the time most closely to approach physical and moral perfection. Around his neck he wears a cameo pendant jewel of Elizabeth I, whose Ambassador he had been in France. The page over which his quill is poised has been left pointedly blank, as if to suggest the frustration of his desire to write an account of his own life. Against the absence of words and the emptiness of that page is set the compensating fullness of the picture: his biography in paint.

Most of the many mini-Untons present on the panel are understandably to be found on its right-hand side, which tells his life story. Anti-clockwise direction, starting at the bottom right-hand corner, we see: Unton as a swaddled baby cradled in his mother’s arms; as a student at Oriel College, Oxford; travelling to Venice and Padua; encamped in the Netherlands on a same military campaign; leading a diplomatic mission to Henri IV in an unsuccessful attempt to scupper a peace treaty between France and Spain: on his deathbed, surrounded by friends and physicians; and, finally, Unton’s body brought back to England, first in a black-sailed ship travelling across the Channel– depicted rather as if it were the river Styx – and then in a horse-drawn hearse winding along a country road. In the middle of this part of the picture, rather like a painted doll’s house, the artist has included an idealised vision of Unton in his many roles at home – as scholar, musician, husband and host – at his family seat of Wadley House, near Oxford.

There is no other English portrait quite like the Unton Memorial, which suggests that the painter responsible is unlikely to have looked to previous portraits for his inspiration. His most likely prototypes were almost certainly from religious art. Compositionally, his picture resembles a Last Judgement, with Unton standing in for Christ; and in its multiplicity of incident recalls paintings of saints’ lives, which are similarly packed with incident. It is my hunch that the painter was a distinctly rusty

religious artist – all religious painting having been proscribed, in accordance with Protestant belief,  at the start of Elizabeth’s reign – suddenly called back into service to paint a rather different, secular subject.

For all its congestedness, the painting conveys very well the depth of grief that accompanied the death of this multi-faceted man. It was almost certainly commissioned by Unton’s widow, Lady Dorothy, of whom we have this description, dated just a month after her husband’s funeral: “She has beautified her sorrow with all the ornaments of an honourable widow. Her black velvet bed, her cypress veil, her voice tuned with a mournful accent, and her cupboard, instead of perfume sprinklers, adorned with prayer books and epitaphs, makes her chamber look like the house of sorrow.” It was for that chamber, no doubt, that the Unton Memorial was originally intended.