Erin Griffey: power, portraits and beauty

With an alabaster complexion, striking eyes and dark curls, the image of Queen Henrietta Maria of France was captured in dozens of portraits by Flemish master Sir Anthony van Dyck.

But these artworks didn’t just serve to accentuate the beauty of the consort of the ill-fated King Charles I of England; they were a means to flex her power.

“Henrietta Maria was celebrated for her radiant complexion and striking eyes and considered beautiful by 17th-century standards,” says professor of art history Erin Griffey, who has extensively studied and written a book on the Catholic queen.

“However, she also faced fierce criticism from her opponents, who condemned her love of luxury, theatrical performances and Catholic faith.

“She commissioned many of these portraits herself and deployed them as gifts with political and diplomatic purposes, so it was all very strategic.” 

Pictures really are worth a thousand words for Erin, who will be reflecting on her rich and diverse career focused on the Early Modern period in Europe (1500 to 1700) in her inaugural professorial lecture on 30 September.

Erin’s interests encompass court culture, portraiture and self-representation, art patronage, dress and jewellery, and, most recently, beauty culture.

Overarchingly, she has been fascinated with women of the period, including the way powerful women, like Queen Henrietta Maria, presented themselves in official portraits.

“Portraiture is a really ripe medium for fashioning oneself,” she says. “I’m interested in what these powerful women commissioned to shape how they wanted to be perceived by posterity, and by their immediate audiences.”

An international academic

Erin describes her academic career as relatively wide and varied.

Unlike many academics, for example, Erin chose not to publish her PhD thesis as a book (her topic was Netherlandish artists’ self-portraits).

“And maybe that was quite liberating, because I felt like once I had figured out how to do research well, I could set a research agenda that wasn’t encumbered by expectations about a PhD.”

Erin grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, the child of academic parents who were also committed and innovative teachers. This gave her an early appreciation of teaching as an honourable profession, to aspire to and take seriously.

“I was able to see first-hand what an impact my parents had on their students.”

But she really experienced the power of good teaching while completing an undergraduate degree in art history with a minor in Medieval studies at Trinity College, a liberal arts university in Connecticut.

“Art history really stuck because the teachers were just out-of-this-world brilliant.”
Then came an opportunity that changed her life’s direction.

“My teachers encouraged me to study abroad for a semester, so I was able to do a course at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. And that was transformative, because I knew I was doing well at Trinity, but when I did really well at the Courtauld, I thought maybe this was something I could continue doing.”

While based in London, Erin was also able to explore Europe and its famous art collections: “It was sort of like I’d been living life in black and white and suddenly I was in technicolour!”

She later got into the Courtauld’s prestigious masters programme, where she specialised in 17th-century Netherlandish art. She went on to do her PhD, supported by scholarship funding and part-time teaching jobs.

“I never took [those opportunities] for granted; I always worked. I had a job all through Trinity and the Courtauld.” 

Then, in 2002, she saw an art history position advertised at the University of Auckland. Despite not knowing anything about New Zealand, or having any contacts here, she applied for the position and found herself on a plane.

“I arrived age 29, and everyone sort of had their friends already,” she recalls. “But my colleagues were so kind and generous to me and gave me a lot of autonomy.”
And she found the Faculty of Arts an exciting place to work.

“Everyone came in to work, everyone was in their office, everyone went out to lunch together. My inbox was flooded with lunch invitations, not just from art history, but from colleagues in English, history, languages and beyond.”

And despite being a European art specialist, she’s embraced the art of her adopted country, curating three portraiture exhibitions. This involved dealing with New Zealand modern and contemporary artworks and artists, and collaborating with colleagues in law, business and creative arts.

A recipe for beauty

Now in her twenty-fifth year of teaching, Erin has supervised 15 PhD and 24 masters candidates and taught around 5,000 students. That includes 79 currently enrolled in her Baroque course, where required reading is her runaway success, Early Modern Court Culture (Routledge, 2022).

Originally commissioned as a textbook, the book became a labour of love and will soon have a second, expanded, full-colour edition.

“I’ve been quite stunned by its success given its niche topic. But I think it’s the kind of textbook I always wanted for my students but didn’t exist. It’s basically a primer on all aspects of Early Modern European court culture with 38 chapters, 36 individual authors from New Zealand, Australia, the US, UK and Europe, really accessible and very much aimed at students.”

Her most recent book, Facing Decay: Beauty, Aging, and Cosmetics in Early Modern Europe (Penn State University Press, 2025), focuses on beauty ideals, ageing and cosmetics in that period.

Surprisingly, she found beauty ideals from that time were remarkably similar to those of today, as was the relentless pressure on women, particularly those in the spotlight, to retain a youthful and beautiful appearance.

“Although men, too, have been invested in their physical appearance, across time, women are clearly singled out for having more at stake socially, but also greater expertise in, and use of, beauty practices.”

Erin says many recipes for Early Modern cosmetics feature ingredients commonly used today – such as rosewater, nut oils and honey – and have been transmitted across long time spans and geographical regions. Others, however, were confronting and no longer in use.

“I found some ingredients shocking to my modern, animal-loving values – for example, puppy fat.

“And I was struck, too, by just how long many of these recipes took to make; it could be intense physical work, not to mention needing the knowledge and experience to make them in the first place.”

One of the most popular recipes, she says, is a simple decoction of rosemary flowers and white wine, which appears in numerous sources, including a small, anonymously published book in Italian called Corona de le Donne (Ferrara, 1526).

It’s one of several recipes that were found to still work, after she recreated them in the lab with University scientists, including Professor Cather Simpson and senior research fellow Dr Michél Nieuwoudt.

“It provided fascinating insight into the making process and the formula created, as well as the chemical compounds and their enduring efficacy in enhancing the appearance of skin.”

Reflecting on her career ahead of her inaugural lecture, she says her students have always been central.

“I think it’s important students know their teacher is at the coalface of the latest research in their field, and that the international scholarly community takes them seriously and thinks their work is good.”

She remains committed to the student experience “from Stage One”.

“I’ve always wanted to make art history exciting, interesting and meaningful, all the way up through to supervision and ongoing mentorship, while remaining accessible to my students – and I believe I’ve done that.

“That’s maybe the proudest thing for me.”

– Julianne Evans