Antonis Mor

In 1554 Mary Tudor, the Catholic queen of England, married Philip of Spain, heir to the Habsburg empire, and a Netherlandish painter was sent to record her. Antonis Mor gave her a fixed, unsmiling stare, hands tense in her lap, dressed in state, every jewel exact. The portrait pleased Philip so much that Mor became his painter, and it survives today in the Prado in Madrid.

Mor had trained in Utrecht under Jan van Scorel, a Dutch painter who had been to Rome, and he spent his career on the road between the courts of Brussels, Lisbon, Madrid and London, painting kings, queens and nobles. Working alongside the great Venetian Titian, who served Philip's father, he helped fix the formula for the European state portrait: the sitter shown at three-quarter length, still and reserved, power carried in posture and costume rather than expression. That formula held for the next 200 years.

Mor's Spanish success did not last. As the Inquisition tightened its grip he left the country and returned north, ending his days in Antwerp around 1576, back in the Netherlandish world where he had begun.