The National Portrait Gallery‘s current exhibition is Elizabeth I And Her People, which explores Elizabeth’s reign alongside the lives of other important people of the late Tudor age. The exhibition uses portraits to explore how explorers, artists, soldiers, writers and merchants portrayed themselves and displayed their wealth and achievements.
I am fairly familiar with this period, having studied history at sixth form and university, and I thought the exhibition did a great job of looking at the sixteenth century and the kind of people who inhabited it, particularly the growing middle classes.