In 2022 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York mounted a landmark exhibition, ‘The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England’, which brought together a dazzling array of objects illustrative of the many and varied materials of the era. Tudor art – traditionally viewed as something outside the art historical mainstream – was officially welcomed into the fold. 

Now Christina J Faraday has produced the first monograph on the whole range of art and artefacts produced in (and, in some cases, imported into) England during ‘the Tudor century’ – the period between 1485, when the 28-year-old Henry Tudor became Henry VII, and 1603, the year that Elizabeth I, his granddaughter, died childless at the age of sixty-nine after nearly forty-five years on the throne. The Story of Tudor Art is, in the main, a work of synthesis rather than new research, but it is no less impressive or enjoyable for that. Indeed, such an approach is very much in keeping with the mindset of the Tudors, for whom, as Faraday notes, ‘sheer novelty’ was ‘not something … particularly valued’. 

Broadly speaking, The Story of Tudor Art is structured chronologically, though within each of its fourteen chapters the approach is thematic. Faraday elegantly summarises and knits together the latest scholarly findings, not just on painting and the other ‘fine’ arts (as we tend to think of them, though the Tudors