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World Art Day: The Portraits of Sir Francis I and Elizabeth Willoughby by George Gower
- Debbie Jordan
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
The 15th April 2026 is World Art Day. A number of reproductions of paintings of the Willoughby family are on display at Middleton Hall. To mark World Art Day, this post will focus on the artistic history of two of these paintings.
The original paintings of Sir Francis I Willoughby and his wife Elizabeth Littleton were commissioned on 13th September 1573. In the Middleton household accounts, it was recorded that Sir Francis paid 10 shillings (about £119.11 today) for his portrait picture and 20 shillings (about £238.23 today) for his wife’s. The portrait of Sir Francis was inscribed “Ano dni 1573” and “Aetatis suae 26”, i.e. “In the year of Our Lord 1573” and “In the 26th year of his age”. The portrait of Elizabeth was similarly inscribed except that her age was given as 27. Both portraits are 75.57cm x 63.5cm in size. A 17th century inventory of Middleton Hall stated that in the Great Hall of Middleton Hall hung seven paintings of Willoughby ancestors. These two paintings are thought to have definitely been amongst those seven.
The two portraits were painted by George Gower. He was born about 1540 and was a gentleman by birth. On his own self-portrait, dated 1579, he placed artist’s dividers over his family coat of arms. In doing so, he was boldly asserting that art was an intellectual pursuit, not just an artisan craft. Gower was considered as the leading English portrait painter in his era and painted many members of the high aristocracy. Furthermore, in 1581, he was appointed as serjeant-painter to Queen Elizabeth I. Gower’s style is renowned for being crisp, clear and rather unsubtle with considerable attention paid to the details of the clothing. He died in London and was buried on 30th August 1596 at St Clement Danes, Strand, Westminster, London.
The paintings of Sir Francis and Elizabeth are thus dated to the early part of Gower’s career, before he became serjeant-painter. There are very few surviving securely documented works by Gower from his early period. In fact, only a total of about eight including the two Willoughby portraits are known to have survived, although it is thought more do exist. Both of the Willoughby portraits are painted against a plain dark brown background. This was a typical feature of Gower’s portraits, as he used that plain background to contrast and emphasise the figure in his painting.
Gower preferred to show his sitter’s wealth through their clothing and these portraits are prime examples of this. In the case of Sir Francis, his rich clothing took the form of black clothing with an element of gold. This black and gold feature is also evident in other portraits by Gower such as those of Sir Thomas Kytson, Sir Thomas Cornwallis and Richard Drake.
In the portrait of Elizabeth, Gower’s attention to clothing detail is evident and in itself created an artistic mystery because it appears pink. Pink was rarely used as a colour in English portraiture in the sixteenth century and, moreover, was almost entirely absent from documents that described the colours of fabrics used for clothing in that era. Close observation of the painting reveals that the white lines overlaying the pink actually belong to a sheer fabric. This is confirmed by observing the pink fabric over her chest which is gathered and has folds and creases, whereas the white lines lie flat over the top of it. The red and white particoloured bows on the sleeves reveal the true colour as red not pink. However, once the red was overlaid by the sheer white fabric the hue of the red changed to appear pink.
Further reading: W. H. Stevenson, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1911. p.432.
Art UK. “George Gower”, https://artuk.org/discover/artists/gower-george-c-15401596
Author - Debbie Jordan, Middleton Hall Volunteer.
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