The familial aspirations for this young boy are clear from the portrait’s iconography.[1] Close comparison can be made to a portrait by William Peake of Francis Russell, 4^th Earl of Bedford as a young boy, (which Strong dated to circa 1600 in ‘The English Icon’).[2] Assuming the sitter in our portrait is indeed a member of the Duncombe family of Battlesden in Bedfordshire, he would undoubtedly have been a neighbour and more than likely a friend of the young Francis Russell. That both Bedfordshire families chose Peake as their artist of choice, must be more than coincidental.

In both portraits, the boys wear the short breeches fashionable in the late 1590s, before the longer, puffier style seen in Peake’s later portraits of the young Henry Prince of Wales and his friend John, 2^nd Lord Harington of Exton, 1603 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and of Henry with his friend Robert Devereux, 3^rd Earl of Essex, c. 1605 (Royal Collection). Our sitter and Francis Russell, are both presented with two loyal hounds, painted in a very similar style. But while Francis holds a hawk, and stands in an interior, our young boy is in a capriccio landscape in the Flemish style, and is holding a bow and arrow – similar to Peake’s portraits of the young Prince of Wales and friends. These sporting pursuits were undoubtedly included as markers of the boys’ courtly and chivalric attributes.

A small hunting scene with figures on horseback and two white harts can be seen in the background of our portrait, along with a hunting lodge. A classical nude statue, presumably Diana the Huntress, or Venus, can also be seen in the left background – it is a setting fit for a young aristocrat. The symbolism continues with a magpie in the tree on the left, and a robin in the tree on the right. In Renaissance Christian iconography, magpies were clearly associated with disease and consumption, and therefore with death,[3] while the robin represented the martyrdom of Christ. The robin’s red chest was associated with the blood of Christ and the robin was thought to have been moved by compassion for the suffering of Jesus, pecking away and removing his crown of thorns.

This symbolism offers a compelling hypothesis for our sitter, and the possibility that he did not survive to adulthood.[4] The tree stump in the foreground, which bears the date 1596, raises the question of whether the portrait is in fact posthumous, with 1596 being the year of the sitter’s death; the felled tree, ‘cut’ untimely, and the young boy, captured forever in an Arcadian setting with his loyal dogs. It perhaps also helps explain the demise of the male Duncombe line.

Robert Peake is today one of the best known of the artists working in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and he had a substantive Studio working under him.  He had a relatively long and successful career as a portraitist following in the tradition of Nicholas Hilliard; first to the minor nobility and landed gentry of late Elizabethan England before becoming, after the accession of James I in 1603, a member of the royal household as principal ‘Picturemaker’ to the young heir to the throne Charles’s elder brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales.  In 1607, around the date of our portrait, he was appointed Serjeant-Painter to James I, a position he held jointly with John de Critz.

By 1598, when he was recorded in Francis Mere's Palladis Tamia, he was regarded as one of the most important painters then practicing in England,and upon the accession of James I in 1603, he was commissioned to paint portraits of the two elder Royal children. The resulting paintings, ‘Henry, Prince of Wales and his friend Sir John Harington of Exton after the hunt’, (Metropolitan Museum, New York),and its companion, that of ‘Princess Elizabeth, later Queen of Bohemia’, (The Queen’s House, Greenwich), were, with their inter-related landscape settings, two of the most ambitious and original images yet seen in British royal portraiture. In 1607, Peake was jointly appointed with John de Critz as Serjeant Painter to James I. His last known dated work is from 1616 and he died in 1619.