We are grateful to Jacqui Ansell, Senior Lecturer Christie’s Education, for her commentary on men’s fashion which has been incorporated into this catalogue note.

Armour was as much a fashion statement as it was a form of protection in the Elizabeth age. In an era of exploration and rapid expansion abroad, men of the royal court were eager to demonstrate their bravery and willingness to fight whilst also showing a level of refinement, separating them from the lower classes. Both these aims could be achieved in portraiture which, as shown in the present work, could fuse traditional attributes of masculinity with broader court fashions.
Sir John Norris was one of the most acclaimed soldiers of his day and was known for his strength and bravery on the battlefield. He was a brutal and highly effective military tactician and preferred to lead from the front, sometimes discarding his armour which ultimately led to no less than nine serious injuries throughout his life. He distinguished himself during the Anglo-Spanish War and was one of only four men to accompany Queen Elizabeth to Tilbury where she gave her famed address to the troops 8th August 1588 ahead of the Spanish Armada. Norris was responsible for training the English militia to resist the Spanish in the event of an invasion and following their failure he was posted to Ireland to help ready fortifications in anticipation of a second invasion. The extensive injuries he sustained over the course of a long and violent career took their toll in later life, and he died in 1597, aged 50.
Norris’s was known as ‘Blackjack’ amongst his troops on account of his dark hair, which he is said to have inherited from his mother. His luxuriant locks of hair, which are equally conspicuous in another portrait of Norris at Knole, are quite unusual for the period and most courtiers from this date wore their hair short. In this instance, Norris’s thick hair helps to frame his face, assisted in no small part by an impressive lace-edged ruff which would have been very expensive to acquire and equally costly to maintain. His social and economic status is further flaunted through his etched and gilded armour, which appears to be a loose interpretation of a style of armour made in Italy at this date. Norris wears a breastplate with ‘pauldrons’ (shoulder armour) decorated with intricate motifs with depictions of trophies of arms – reminiscent of Roman triumphs, signalling the wearer’s ambitions to be seen as a renaissance man, interested in the classics. It seems unlikely, due to its looseness of detail in areas, that the armour was painted from life and was instead perhaps based on a print or pattern made available to the artist.
The iconography of Norris has in the past been confused with that of Drake, however, similarities between the present portrait and others depicting Norris confirms that the inscription is correct and that it is indeed he who is represented here.[1] Until the mid-nineteenth century this portrait was considered a touchstone work within Norris’s recorded iconography. It was copied by Sarah, Countess of Essex (1759-1838), who copied it in gouache for Lucy Aikin’s (1781-1864) Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth published in 1825. It was also copied in 1818 by the portrait painter and watercolourist George Perfect Harding (1781-1853), who specialised in reproducing in watercolour important historical portraits in private collections. Unfortunately, we do not know where Harding saw and studied the present work, however, he evidently considered it an important likeness worthy of wider dissemination.
[1] See for example, the portrait of Sir John Norris at Knole in Kent (Attributed to Jan van Belcamp) which is one of a set of 44 portraits depicting notable Elizabethan sitters probably commissioned by Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset (1536 – 1608) in around 1605. The Knole portrait was probably based on the portrait attributed to William Segar in a private collection (Private Collection LXVI, Heinz Archive). A further portrait, again deriving from the portrait attributed to Segar, was previously in the collection of the Norris family and was sold by the order of the executors of the late Christopher Norris at Christie’s, 20 July 1990, lot 302 (as by George Gower).