Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, England ca. 1590-1600. Oil on canvas. Sonnet in cartouche on lower right can be read in comments. Royal Collection Trust [1412×2250]

[display description, Metropolitan Museum of Art loan](https://i.ibb.co/WKxnmmj/20221023-145809.jpg)

[Portrait of an Unknown Woman. ca. 1590-1600

Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561-1635, 36)

Oil on canvas

Lent by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

Combining painting and poetry. this is one of the most celebrated–and mysterious—of all Elizabethan portraits. An unknown woman in theatrical costume crowns a weeping stag with a garland of flowers.
The inscribed sonnet adds to the painting’s melancholy atmosphere, with the speaker describing her “restless mind” and “pensive thoughts” as she contemplates “cruelty unkind.” Scholars have proposed many possible identifications for this grief-stricken woman. One of the most persuasive is Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, a poet whose life was marked by personal tragedy in the years to which the painting can be dated on stylistic grounds. The portrait demonstrates how Elizabethan courtiers used portraiture and poetry to stylize even the most personal emotions.]

https://www.rct.uk/collection/406024/portrait-of-an-unknown-woman

[In a cartouche lower right is the following sonnet:

*The restless swallow fits my restless minde,*

*In still revivinge still renewinge wronges;*

*her Just complaintes of cruelty unkinde,*

*are all the Musique, that of my life prolongs.*

*With pensive thoughtes my weeping Stagg I crowne*

*whose Melancholy teares my cares Expresse;*

*her Teares in silence, and my sighes unknowne*

*are all the physicke that my harmes redresse.*

*My onely hope was in this goodly tree,*

*which I did plant in love bringe up in care:*

*but all in vanie [sic], for now to late I see*

*the shales be mine, the kernels others are.*

*My Musique may be plaints, my physique teares*

*If this be all the fruite my love tree beares.*]