From The Daily Reflector:

“As recently as Thursday morning, East Carolina University history professor Larry Tise searched for the reason that a portrait of Queen Elizabeth I crossed the ocean to be purchased by a North Carolina woman living in New York City in 1958.

It’s a final detail eluding Tise and a team of ECU researchers who spent the last six months staring into and through her painted visage, he announced Thursday to a group of 30 people.

The painting was placed in the researchers’ care by the staff and governing board of the Elizabethan Gardens, in whose gate house it hung for 50 years under speculation. Prior queries produced conflicting opinions about whether it was authentic or unimportant.

Local conservators, art historians, photographers and scientists established a number of other facts this year.

On a visit to Sir Henry Lee in 1592, a 59-year-old Queen Elizabeth sat for a portrait with Lee’s artist in residence, Marcus Gheeraerts. The piece in question is a copy made of the much larger work created that day, in which she is pictured standing over her kingdom.

Tise said it is not a traced copy of her bejeweled head and torso, but one that was painted freehand — a much more difficult skill. Pigmentation tests showed that one person may have painted the majority of it and another filled in the face, he said.

The purchaser, Ruth Coltrane Cannon, was aiding in the restoration of New Bern’s Tryon Palace and was buying any antiques that looked the part. But she also was a gardening enthusiast who had led campaigns to have gardens cultivated next to historical homes.”

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