George Villiers (1592–1628), 1st Duke of Buckingham

George Villiers (1592–1628), 1st Duke of Buckingham, was the most powerful and controversial royal favourite of the English Jacobean and Caroline courts — James I's intimate companion and Charles I's closest confidant and chief minister until his assassination in 1628. Buckingham's visit to The Hague on diplomatic business was part of his wider European diplomatic activities in the mid-1620s, and Mierevelt's portrait of him at Cambridge University Library places this image within an English learned institutional collection. Villiers was notorious for his extraordinary physical beauty as well as his political recklessness; his assassination by John Felton in Portsmouth ended an era of favourite-led English politics. Mierevelt's portrait captures this extraordinary figure in the language of Dutch civic portraiture — measured, formal, dignified — rather than the more theatrical imagery that English and Flemish artists applied to him.

The oil on canvas support allows slightly freer handling than panel. Villiers, as Duke of Buckingham, would almost certainly have been painted in court dress of the finest quality — silk, velvet, and lace — presenting Mierevelt with the full range of his textile-rendering skills. The face, if consistent with other images of Buckingham, shows the regular, handsome features that made him one of the celebrated beauties of the age.