framing robert aggas: the painter–stainers' company and the ‘english school of painters’

FRAMING ROBERT AGGAS: THE

PAINTER–STAINERS’ COMPANY AND THE

‘ENGLISH SCHOOL OF PAINTERS’

R I C H A R D J O H N S

On Tuesday 24 June 1710 the German tourist and bibliophile Zacharias Conradvon Uffenbach left his Westminster lodgings in Suffolk Street armed, as usual,with a copy of Edward Hatton’s A New View of London, the latest and best pocket-sized guide to the capital. After first calling at Viscount Fanshawe’s book sale,Uffenbach took a hackney to the City, where he spent the rest of the morning atthe Hall of the Painter–Stainers’ Company in Little Trinity Lane. ‘The Hall’, helater noted in his journal, ‘is not very large but is elegant and contains somesweet paintings.’1 To this cursory impression Uffenbach added a few remarks on ahandful of the paintings on display, together with a page reference to the secondvolume of A New View of London, where a more detailed account of the building andits contents could be found. There, Hatton describes an impressive interior‘adorned with a handsome Screen, Arches, Pillars and Pilasters of the CorinthianOrder, painted in imitation of Porphory with gilded Capitals’, and wainscot walls‘imbellished with great variety of History and other Painture exquisitelyperformed’.2 The guidebook then identifies seventeen of the most notablepaintings in the Hall, giving a brief title and, in most cases, the surname of themaker. Among the ‘great variety’ of history pieces mentioned by Hatton are aversion of ‘Endymeon and Luna, by Palmaitier’, a picture of ‘Orpheus fleaing Pan, byBrull’, and an allegory of ‘Art and Envy by Hungis’.3 There is a depiction of theGreek philosophers Heraclitus and Democritus by Penn, portraits of Charles IIand Catherine of Braganza (the latter by Howsman), and another of the anti-quarian and herald William Camden. Also mentioned is a landscape by Aggas, ‘ARuin’ by Griffier, a painting of the Fire of London by an unnamed artist, ‘A Piece ofArchitecture’ by Trevitt, another by Thompson, and animal pictures and flowerpieces by the likes of Robinson, Barlow and ‘Everbrook’.4

Few of these artists’ names are familiar today outside the specialist field ofseventeenth-century English art. Howsman, or Jacob Huysmans, a history andportrait painter from Antwerp, whose success at the court of Queen Catherineearned him the unofficial title of ‘Her Majesty’s Painter’, is perhaps the bestknown.5 Both Robert Robinson and Francis Barlow were successful Englishpainters whose reputation survives, largely thanks to their activities in the print

DOI:10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00609.xART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 31 NO 3 . JUNE 2008 pp 322-341

322 & Association of Art Historians 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

trade. Both men also worked asdecorative painters in and around thecapital, producing figurative panelsand ceilings for London’s fashionableinteriors, or scenery for the theatre.6

And Jan Griffier, whose ‘Ruin’ was oneof several paintings acquired by thePainter–Stainers during the 1670s, isremembered as the head of a moder-ately successful family of Dutch land-scape painters that included his sonRobert and grandson Jan the younger.But of all the paintings he saw in theCompany’s Hall in 1710, Uffenbachsingled out one which he consideredthe finest of those on display – a largelandscape by the English painterRobert Aggas (plate 1).

Several aspects of Uffenbach’sexcursion to Little Trinity Lane deserveour attention. First, it is notable that anearly eighteenth-century visitor shouldfind such an extensive display of easelpainting – from ambitious historicalsubjects to flower painting, and by bothnative and foreign makers – at thehome of London’s Painter–Stainers’Company, an organization that, with a few notable exceptions, has rarely beendeemed worthy of serious consideration by historians of English art.7 Second, it isstriking that, of all the paintings on display in 1710, it should have been the work ofa native English artist (and a landscape painter as well) that was judged to be thevery best by an educated, well-travelled visitor like Uffenbach. It is remarkable alsothat the artist behind the painting should now be virtually unknown, recognizedonly as the author of this one image.8

A Latin inscription that used to hang above the painting in the Painter–Stainers’Hall, and which was transcribed by Uffenbach, a keen epigrapher, tells us that theartist’s father had also been a painter (Ex patra peniculario), and that the picture wasmade and given to the Company (pinxit ac posuit) by the artist in 1679:

Robertus Aggas / Pictor penicularius / Ex patra peniculario / hanc Tabulum pinxit ac posuit /

MDCLXXIX9

A few additional details of Aggas’s career can be gleaned from the minutedmeetings of the Painter–Stainers’ governing Court of Assistants. From them welearn, for example, that Aggas became a freeman of the Company in October 1646,and that his painter father, also his master, was Samuel Aggas, an active Companyman who served in the senior office of upper warden in 1653.10 In April 1657Robert Aggas approached the Company’s officers to appeal against the actions of a

1 Robert Aggas, Landscape at Sunset, 1679. Oil on

canvas, 254 � 175 cm. London: Painters’ Hall.

Photo: The Worshipful Company of Painter–

Stainers.

T H E PA I N T E R – S TA I N E R S ’ C O M PA N Y A N D T H E ‘ E N G L I S H S C H O O L O F PA I N T E R S ’

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fellow painter, Captain Brewer, ‘for worke tooke out of his hands after he hadbegune the same at Mr Tomlins at Bowe’.11 The nature of this complaint, indi-cative of the kind of regulatory responsibilities assumed by the Company,suggests that Aggas, during the earlier part of his career at least, followed hisfather and found employment in the collaborative industry of decoration, as ahouse painter – the largest and most varied branch of the trade during theseventeenth century. But it is to Bainbrigg Buckeridge, author of An Essay towardsan English School of Painters (1706), that one must turn for the first and onlysubstantial account of the artist’s professional life:

Mr. ROBERT AGGAS, commonly call’d Augus, [w]as a good English Landskip-Painter, both in Oyl

and Distemper. He was also Skilful in Architecture, in which kind he Painted many Scenes for the

Play-House in Covent-Garden. There are not many of his Pictures extant among us; of those that

are, the most considerable is a Piece of Landskip presented by him to the Company of Painter–

Stainers, (whereof he was a Member) and which now hangs in their Hall. He is reckon’d among

the best of our English Landskip Painters, and became eminent, not so much by his Labour and

Industry, as thro’ the bent of his natural Genius. He died in London, in the year 1679, and about

the Sixtieth of his Age.12

While Buckeridge may have been mistaken over the date of Aggas’s death (perhapsa misunderstanding of the original inscription in the Painter–Stainers’ Hall),13

his comment that Aggas worked both in oil and distemper, and that he was asuccessful scene painter at the Covent Garden playhouse, reflects accuratelythe kind of varied employment that a skilled English painter working duringthe second half of the seventeenth century could expect. Distemper, or ‘drypainting’ as it was sometimes known,14 comprising pigment mixed with waterand size, was a relatively inexpensive medium used by a large section of the City’sworking painters. Widely employed in the production of stage scenery, ceremo-nial arches and other large-scale temporary work, it was equally useful forfinishing interior walls with a single colour by those at the lower end of the trade.As such, painting in distemper was associated with a broad brush, speed ofexecution and a relatively limited palette.15 Yet it was his work as a ‘Landskip-Painter’, exemplified by the oil painting in the Painter–Stainers’ Hall, thatqualified Aggas for inclusion in Buckeridge’s influential essay as a leadingmember of the ‘English school’, and which has provided the sole basis for hisartistic reputation ever since.16

Aggas’s picture, which still hangs in the Company’s Hall, is a prospect of arocky landscape at sunset. A well-trodden path leads from the immediate fore-ground to a wooded hillside on the left, the view partially obscured by a group oftall weather-beaten trees whose height emphasizes the vertical format of thepainting and divides the composition into two distinct halves. To the right is anarrow lake that stretches towards a group of buildings, a distant town perhaps,just visible in the fading light. Several other dwellings occupy the hillside or standon the lakeside, reflected on the water, as other signs of human activity – a smallsailing boat, a pair of figures glimpsed between the trees – introduce a pastoralelement to the twilight scene. It is, by any measure, an accomplished painting;one that corresponds most closely with the Dutch Italianate tradition of land-scape that originated in the work of Claude and Nicolas Poussin and was carried


324 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2008

northwards by the likes of Jan Both (see, for example, plate 2) and NicolaesBerchem, whose atmospheric, idealized prospects inspired a further generation ofNetherlandish painters. It is a style of painting, moreover, that enjoyed a notablepopularity in England during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,thanks to the circulation of old master paintings and to a growing number ofimmigrant artists working in and around London.17 Among the latter, less well-known painters were artists such as Adriaen van Diest (see, for example, plate 3), JanWyck (plate 4), Jan Loten and others, contemporaries of Aggas, many of whom, aswill become apparent, enjoyed some kind of professional association with thePainter–Stainers’ Company following their arrival in England. However, at well over2 m high, Aggas’s painting is considerably larger than most of its kind.

Aggas’s is a work, moreover, that seems to embody its maker’s dual identity,alluded to by Buckeridge, as both industrious Painter–Stainer and classicallyoriented landscape artist. On the one hand, the work demonstrates an impressivecommand of the techniques and pictorial conventions of contemporary seven-teenth-century landscape painting, especially the compositional and lightingeffects adopted by Both and other Netherlandish painters of the mid-century. Indoing so, Aggas’s painting anticipates the emergence of an established notion ofideal English landscape art (as distinct from the growing fashion for topo-graphical landscape and estate portraiture) by half a century or more. On theother hand, the unusual size of the painting and, on close inspection, a corre-sponding loose handling of paint are suggestive of the kind of temporaryscenographic work to which the painter more often turned his talents. Too large

2 Jan Both, Italian Landscape, c. 1637–41. Oil on canvas, 147 � 206 cm. Cambridge: Fitzwilliam

Museum. Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.



for any likely domestic interior, it seems to have been purposely designed, if notfor the stage, then for the civic milieu of the Painter–Stainers’ Hall; to be viewedalongside (and thus in competition with) other painters’ work that had found itsway into the Company’s possession, such as the ‘Ruin’ that Griffier gave to the Hallin the 1670s. Griffier’s was one of many paintings destroyed, for the most part

3 Adriaen van Diest, An Extensive Italianate Landscape, c. 1680. Oil on canvas, 84 � 143 cm. Location

unknown. Photo: Christie’s Images.

4 Jan Wyck, Landscape with Ruin, c. 1680. Oil on canvas, 94 � 124 cm. Private

collection. Photo: Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.



without visual record, during the 1939–45 war. However, some idea of its appear-ance may be inferred from another Ruin (plate 5), painted around the same timeand of a comparable size to the lost Painter–Stainers’ piece.18

The rich visual environment of the Painter–Stainers’ Hall, merely suggestedby Hatton’s selective description and crystallized by Uffenbach’s encounter withAggas’s remarkable painting, challenges the usual characterization of London’sPainter–Stainers as a retrograde presence in the early modern capital. At the veryleast, it forces us to reconsider the hitherto persistent view of the Company as ‘anessentially medieval and reactionary body’ – a culturally backward organizationthat was on the point of collapse at the restoration of Charles II,19 and whosesubsequent history offers little or no meaningful contribution to our under-standing of the visual culture of seventeenth-century England. The panoply ofimages on the Hall’s walls, and the emergence within that environment of anartist recognized a generation later as ‘among the best of our English LandskipPainters’, raises fundamental questions about the making and reception ofEnglish painting during the latter part of the seventeenth century and, no lessimportantly, about the Company’s relevance to a growing community of foreignpicture-makers living and working in the post-Fire capital.

Any study of painting in England during the 1600s is indebted to thebiographical sketches and occasional critical remarks that comprise Bainbrigg

5 Jan Griffier I, Moonlit Landscape with Ruin, 1679. Oil on canvas, 39 � 48 cm. Location unknown.

Photo: Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.



Buckeridge’s aforementioned Essay towards an English School of Painters. Firstpublished in 1706 as an appendix to John Savage’s translation of Roger de Piles’sThe Art of Painting, and the Lives of the Painters, Buckeridge’s Essay is furnished withthe ‘lives’ of nearly a hundred artists who either were born or had worked inEngland since the arrival of Hans Holbein the younger in the 1520s. To aconsiderable extent, of course, the resulting ‘English school’ is an imaginaryentity – a textual invention compiled, as the author freely acknowledges, as apatriotic riposte to De Piles’s enthusiasm for the ‘French school’, to convince thereader that ‘English Painters and Paintings, both for their Number and their Merit,have a better Claim to the Title of a School, than those of France.’20

Arranged alphabetically (beginning, coincidentally, with Robert Aggas), the‘Essay’ shows little concern for chronology or for the typological niceties of genreor style. However, a simple analysis of Buckeridge’s text reveals a more substantivebasis to the so-called ‘English school’ it describes. Of the ninety-eight paintersincluded by Buckeridge in 1706, no fewer than fifty-four were foreigners. Of those,forty-three were active in England during the second half of the seventeenthcentury – the majority (around thirty-five, or one-third, of the entire ‘Englishschool’) having travelled from the Low Countries or northern Germany.21 Only afew of these overseas artists had enjoyed the lucrative patronage of the Restora-tion court. Many others established themselves, with varying success, withinLondon’s ever-expanding portrait industry, or by producing landscape over-mantels, flower pieces and the occasional history piece for the capital’s fashion-able interiors. As such, the Essay provides a valuable (and, in some cases, unique)record of a substantial number of foreign picture-makers who travelled toEngland, for the most part, during the 1670s and 1680s. To these are added only ahandful of recent English painters, Aggas among them, whose work was judgedby the author as capable of competing with that of the incomers.

The increasingly visible presence of overseas artists is now acknowledged asan important strand within the broader narrative of early modern English arthistory – one that reaches beyond the elite few favoured by royal and aristocraticpatrons. Modern studies of auction catalogues and, more recently, of probateinventories from the second half of the seventeenth century have revealed both asubstantial appetite for pictures among London’s middling sort and the extent towhich a burgeoning art market was supplied with new works by foreign paintersresident in the capital.22 What has until now been less apparent is the role playedby the Painter–Stainers’ Company within the cultural economy of early modernLondon, and the extent to which foreign artists, following their arrival inEngland, chose to identify with the social and professional milieu of the City’snative painters. By delving further into the archival history of the Company, itwill become clear that some form of association with London’s Painter–Stainersproved to be an attractive proposition for many incoming painters, their presencefostering a mutually beneficial relationship that, within a generation, enabledBuckeridge and his readers to envisage an ‘English school’ of painters.

P I C T U R E - M A K E R SFrom its incorporation during the reign of Elizabeth I, the Painters’ Company,later the Painter–Stainers, provided a natural home for professional paintersworking in and around the City of London.23 By the end of the sixteenth century



the Company encompassed a wide range of practice, from the simple rendering ofwalls and ceilings with a single colour to the work of more highly skilled housepainters who specialized in fashionable grotesquery or in the painted imitation ofmaterials such as walnut, marble and porphyry, real versions of which were tooexpensive for all but the most luxurious interiors. Along with the arms painters(specializing in heraldry) and leather gilders, the City’s house painters, accom-panied by their journeymen assistants and apprentices, constituted the majorityof painters working in London in the seventeenth century. For these tradesmen,membership of the Painter–Stainers’ Company provided a variety of meaningfulprofessional and social associations; a reliable source of apprentice labour; and alimited degree of protection against the unauthorized practice of others. Inaddition to the occupational advantages and obligations of membership, freedomof the Company conveyed citizenship, with a limited ‘freedom’ to participate inthe political affairs of the City. In this way the Company provided a framework inwhich the social and professional interests of London’s skilled painters coincidedwith the political and economic interests of the City as a whole.

The early history of the Company is punctuated by encounters betweenLondon’s native painters, many of whom were members, and a relatively smallcommunity of foreign-born painters working in and around the capital, amountingto what has been described as ‘a history of conflict’ between the two parties.24 Butas Susan Foister has shown, such disputes were often prompted less by the nationalstatus or religious identity of the strangers concerned than by the apparent favourthey received from the royal household, and by the fact that the privileges of crownemployment exempted many foreign artists from the City’s jurisdiction. Duringone relatively well-documented episode, the Company’s officers agreed to considera petition to Charles I against several foreign painters, including Daniel Mytens andOrazio Gentileschi, whose presence at court was deemed to be a threat to thelivelihood of certain native painters. Demands for the petition had been voicedtowards the end of 1626 by a group of English portrait painters led by ‘MrCoddington painter’, and by William Peake and Richard Greenbury, both membersof the Goldsmiths’ Company. The Company’s decision to support these English-bornpainters seems to have had little of the desired effect, however. Instead, it markedthe beginning of a fractious decade that culminated in the imprisonment of oneforeign painter (the aptly named ‘Mr Crosse’), and reinforced the cultural andgeographical divide between the capital’s native painters on the one hand and asmaller circle of foreign artists under the king’s patronage on the other.25

If the 1630s witnessed a terminal decline in relations between the court and theCity of London, the decade that followed saw a renewal in the fortunes of theCorporation and its constituent bodies in matters of politics and culture. The deathof Anthony van Dyck in 1641 and the outbreak of civil war the following year are,with good reason, associated with a temporary hiatus in the courtly visual cultureof seventeenth-century England. However, the decades of conflict and interregnumthat ensued fostered a new demand for the visual that was no less varied.

Within the capital, the absence of the court prompted a decisive shift in rela-tions between the Painter–Stainers and their rivals from overseas that would have alasting effect on the course of painting in England. At a meeting on 4 March 1649(O.S.), the Painter–Stainers’ governing body agreed that ‘all those Natives that bePicturemakers, and are admitted of this Company, who have not served to freemen



of this Cittie [that is, those who had not served the previously required seven-yearapprenticeship], shall pay d3 a man for their admittance, besides 20 s more for yeduties of the hall.’26 This inconspicuous entry in the Painter–Stainers’ minute bookmarks the beginning of a new and vibrant episode in the Company’s relations withEngland’s resident ‘picturemakers’. Among the English painters made free on thesame day were Francis Barlow and the portrait painter Robert Walker. However, the‘native’ painters stipulation here is misleading, as, in the months and years thatfollowed, the Company’s clerk dutifully recorded the names of numerous overseaspicture-makers as they appeared before the Court of Assistants to request admis-sion as ‘stranger brothers’ or ‘foreign brothers’.27

No explanation is given for the Company’s change of attitude towards theadmission of strangers, although its decision may have been encouraged by thesurprise appearance at Little Trinity Lane of Peter Lely two years earlier. Lely hadbeen one of a small group of former court artists (along with Thomas Rawlins, chiefengraver at the Royal Mint, and the poet Richard Lovelace) to appear before theCourt of Assistants in 1647, a year after the surrender of Oxford.28 For Lely and hiscompanions, the Painter–Stainers’ Company provided an opportunity to reclaim aplace within the capital’s artistic economy once it had become apparent that theroyal household, previously the cultural focus and principal source of patronagefor incoming artists, would not be making an immediate return to the capital. Atthe same time, the enhanced authority of the City during the war and interregnumenabled the Company to flex its civic muscles by demanding a substantial ‘d3 aman’ from those artists, like Lely, who either remained or arrived in the capitalafter the king’s departure. Accordingly, on 31 March 1653 Abraham Vanderheydenappeared before a meeting of the Court of Assistants with a request ‘that he mightbe admitted a member of this Company’. Vanderheyden was joined the followingSeptember by the Antwerp painter John Baptist Gaspars, one of several artistsassociated with Lely’s factory-like operation during the 1670s.29 Both men wereduly admitted on payment of the stipulated d3. From this moment, for the nextthree decades, the Company’s minutes reveal a significant number of foreignersrequesting, and being granted, admission as stranger brothers.

The degree to which foreign painters were tolerated by the Company’s rankand file depended largely on the threat, real or imagined, that their presenceposed for existing members. For those at the lower end of the trade, alreadyvulnerable to the encroachment of unskilled labourers, the further imposition of‘strangers’ was something to be resisted. In 1656, for example, representatives ofthe Company’s ordinary freemen, or yeomanry, asked the Court of Assistants toconsider action against a number of ‘Aliens, Bricklayers, Plasterers and others’who had abused the painters’ privileges. Concerned that the recent tolerance ofstrangers had extended beyond the decreed ‘picturemakers’, the aggrievedmembers asked that ‘strangers might not be admitted into the said Company ford3 fine but that they might be prosecuted’.30 And twenty years later, in 1675, theadmission of a well-known French gilder, Renatus Cozens, was deferred followingan appeal from several members that his presence was ‘to the greate prejudice ofthe members of this company of the same profession’. The well-connected Cozenswas eventually admitted, thanks to the intervention of the lord mayor and theDuke of Ormond, but only alongside an agreement from the Company’sgoverning Court of Assistants that, in future, no other foreigners would be made



free without first giving the opportunity for existing members to appeal againsttheir admission.31 Such protests, however, pale in comparison to the number offoreign picture-makers who were admitted without incident, and whose novelpictorial skills posed no immediate threat to the established branches of thetrade. And so it was that when six ‘divers Dutchmen’ appeared before the Court ofAssistants in July 1662, one of whom was Jacob Huysmans, their enrolment asstranger brothers met with no opposition.32

The number of incoming artists admitted into the Company continued to growduring the 1670s and 1680s. Among them were Jan Wyck, the landscape and battlepainter, who appeared before the Court of Assistants in June 1674 to requestadmittance for himself and his artist father Thomas.33 The next month saw thefirst appearance in Little Trinity Lane of Marcellus Lauron, described by Buckeridgeas ‘a general Painter’ equally adept at portraits and smaller genre pieces, butperhaps best known today for his designs for The Cryes of London and as the father ofthe better-known Marcellus Laroon.34 In October 1677 ‘Peter Delamotte a Zealander[was] sworne and admitted a brother of this Company’; followed that December bythe aforementioned landscape painter Jan Griffier, who appeared along with theDutch flower specialist Frans van Everbroeck and another painter, John Christian.35

Many others are known today by name only, among them ‘Charels Founderhurst inNorthampton buildings in Blomesbury market’, admitted as a stranger in 1670, and‘Vanbeck’ of Durham Yard, admitted in 1677, their presence noted without fanfareamid the everyday business of the Company.36 The inclusion by the Company’sclerk of a painter’s address is rare but revealing, suggesting a tendency for strangerpainters to lodge in Westminster, beyond the official jurisdiction of the Company,and thus indicating the voluntary nature of their affiliation.

Still more artists crossed paths with the Company in less formal ways. In 1687,for example, the two most celebrated foreign painters working in England at thetime, Antonio Verrio and Godfrey Kneller, attended the feast of the Society ofPainters, an annual event held at the Company’s Hall by a group of ambitiouspainters looking to reach beyond the traditional, artisanal remit of their parentCompany.37 One clear advantage for incoming artists of an association with thePainter–Stainers’ Company can be gathered from ‘Vanspreat’, possibly a flowerpainter, who became a ‘foreign brother’ in 1682. In the ten years following his firstappearance, Vanspreat acquired no fewer than five apprentices through theCompany, three of whom were women.38

The changing relationship between London’s Painter–Stainers and their‘stranger brothers’ finds a focus in the career in England of ‘Mr Flusheere’. A Dutchface painter and sometime assistant of Lely, Flusheere is first named in theCompany’s records in the summer of 1652 as one of three strangers (one of themLely himself, the other a ‘Mr Leigh’) who were summoned to appear before the lordmayor for ‘not being conformable’.39 Any threat of prosecution was lifted thefollowing January, however, when Flusheere agreed to pay twenty shillings inarrears, after which relations between the two parties became decidedly warmer, somuch so, in fact, that in February 1657 (O.S.), the Court of Assistants took theunprecedented step of appointing both Flusheere and Lely to the Company’sgoverning council as ‘stranger assistants’.40 Unlike Lely, whose enthusiasm for thePainter–Stainers was soon overshadowed by his remarkable success at the Restora-tion court, Flusheere seems to have embraced the opportunity of a closer association



with London’s professional painters. For many years he was an active participant inthe Company’s affairs, regularly sitting alongside the master and wardens as aspokesman for the growing number of stranger painters working in the capital.41

On one such occasion, in 1677, Flusheere was one of two painters chosen to repre-sent the picture-makers on a special committee, appointed from the principalbranches of the trade to discuss a proposal for renewing the Company’s Elizabethancharter. The Dutchman’s participation in such an important constitutional matter,alongside the City’s arms painters (represented on the committee by four members),house painters (with ten representatives) and leather gilders (with six), indicatesthat, although still a minority, London’s immigrant artistic community was by nowrecognized as a significant and permanent force within the Company.42

Two years later Flusheere presented to the Court of Assistants a petitionoutlining the grievances of ‘divers foreigne Paynters’.43 The precise nature of theforeigners’ complaint is not stated, although there may be some connection withan ongoing dispute, sparked by an earlier petition from a group of strangersdescribed by the Company’s clerk as ‘Limners and others’, appealing for help inrestraining the sale of imported pictures.44 In reality, the Company was powerlessto prevent the influx of oil paintings from abroad, but the fact that foreignpicture-makers were able to approach the Painter–Stainers for assistance over thisor any other matter, and that they could expect to be heard, is in marked contrastto the Company’s lengthy dispute with Mytens, Gentileschi and others just ageneration earlier. More generally, Flusheere’s ongoing and official presence as a‘stranger assistant’ points to a willingness among London’s native painters toaccommodate the cultural and economic challenges posed by the arrival of highlyskilled artists from the Continent, and to do so with greater acumen andsophistication than has hitherto been recognized.

T H E PA I N T E R – S TA I N E R S ’ H A L LThe Company embarked on its most ambitious collaboration with the foreignpicture-makers in September 1677, when a further committee of senior Painter–Stainers and prominent stranger associates was appointed ‘to consider . . . the bestmethod [of] regulateing the Paynters & encourageing of Artistets [sic]’.45 This entryin the Company’s minute book is of interest in itself as the first (if rather awkward)modern use of the term ‘artist’ by the Court of Assistants. It is probable that thedecision to paint the ceiling of the Hall, first mooted the following February,originated from a meeting of this committee – perhaps on the advice of theSerjeant Painter, Robert Streeter, an English artist renowned for painting the ceilingof Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre, and who, curiously (though perhaps onaccount of his training overseas), joined Flusheere, Gaspars and Lely as anappointed representative of the strangers.46 First to be approached for the task wasThomas Stephenson, a senior figure within the Company and, Buckeridge informsus, ‘a good Painter, not only in Landskip, but also in Figures and Architecture inDistemper’, very much in the mould of his former master Robert Aggas.47 There is nofurther mention of Stephenson, however, and in 1681 the task eventually fell toIsaac Fuller the younger, one of only a handful of English painters with thenecessary skills to embark on such a project (Streeter had died the previous year).48

Although there remains no visual record of Fuller’s long-lost ceiling, someidea of its appearance can be found in that most useful of guides, Hatton’s A New



View of London, where it is described as ‘finely painted with Pallas triumphant withthe Arts, and Fame (attended by Mercury) suppressing their Enemies, Sloth, Envy,Pride etc’.49 The subject of Fuller’s allegory supports the suggestion that Streeterand his companions on the 1677 committee were charged with overseeing theproject. Though referring to a painting on a considerably smaller scale, Hatton’sdescription of Fuller’s scheme bears a notable affinity with Streeter’s work at theSheldonian, in which the artist depicted an infant figure of Truth descending onthe Arts and Sciences, with Pallas Athene, Hercules and Mercury (each repre-sented as an infant) expelling Envy, Rapine and Ignorance from the scene.50 Theintroduction of such lofty artistic themes into the Painter–Stainers’ Hall was asignificant departure from the civic iconography that had previously defined thisand other company halls across the City. It was also a considerable financialundertaking, requiring that the building itself be remortgaged. As such, Fuller’sceiling represented an unprecedented cultural and material investment in theCompany’s identity and reputation, and marked a final stage in its recovery fromthe disastrous fire of 1666. Previously, the Painter–Stainers’ Hall had provided animpressive, if modest, environment for the Company’s meetings; for bindingapprentices and holding elections, and for hosting the calendar of official saints’day feasts that gave a tempo to the life of the professional painter in the City. Withthe addition of Fuller’s Pallasian allegory, it also announced itself as the naturalhome for all aspiring picture-makers in the capital.

Meanwhile, the alliance between London’s professional painters and thecapital’s burgeoning community of foreign artists was becoming visibly apparentin other ways, thanks to the practice of demanding from strangers a ‘proof piece’or ‘master piece’, as a condition of their acceptance.51 The Company’s recordsreveal the almost accidental way in which, during the later 1600s, the Hall inLittle Trinity Lane became home to a showcase of paintings by some of the mosthighly regarded foreign painters working in England. In February 1677 (O.S.)Marcellus Lauron made a second appearance before the Court of Assistants and‘promised to bring in his proofe peece and to pay his quarteridge.’52 Lauron wasfollowed a month later by ‘Mr Adrian Vandest’ (van Diest), noted by Buckeridge asa ‘fam’d Landskip Painter’ from the Hague, who ‘appeared now and promiseth togive his proofe piece.’53 Similarly, in September 1682, ‘Peter Vandermulen’,brother of Louis XIV’s favourite battle painter Adam Frans van der Meulen,presented himself at the Painter–Stainers’ Hall, was made ‘a Foreign Brother ofthis Company and paid 40 s and promised a proof piece.’54

A good indication of the quantity of proof pieces and other paintings acquiredby the Company, and of the value set upon them, was given in 1681 when the Courtof Assistants agreed to prepare a book ‘for ye entring of all persons names that shallgive any paintings to ye hall or have [been] Benefactors’.55 This book, a version ofwhich George Vertue saw during a visit to the Hall in the 1720s, has long sincedisappeared, along with many of the paintings it recorded. So it is to later accounts– to Hatton’s description of a building ‘imbellished with great variety of Historyand other Painture exquisitely performed’, and to the partial glimpses offered bythe likes of Uffenbach, Vertue and others – that we must look for an impression ofthe Painter–Stainers’ Hall around the turn of the eighteenth century.56

Of considerable value for any reconstruction of the hall is the Company’sterrier, or inventory, first completed in 1723 and updated in 1766.57 The terrier



served as a register for auditing the Company’s possessions, from two muskets, asword and a bayonet to more workaday items of kitchen furniture. After anaccount of the Company’s silver plate (its most valuable asset) is a comprehensivelist of the paintings in the hall. The ground-floor parlour, where the Court ofAssistants met, provided a suitable setting for portraits commemorating pastmasters and other distinguished members, while the majority of the otherpaintings, including many that had been acquired as proof pieces during theprevious century, were housed in the main upper hall. Among the paintings thatcan be confidently placed in the hall before c. 1700, alongside many of those worksalready mentioned, were ‘a small whole length of King David with Goliath’s headin his hand’, ‘a Christmas peece being the Birth of our Saviour in a plain GuiltFrame painted by Collony’ (whether by Adam Coloni, or his son Henry, is notstated), a painting of two figures by Lauron (later described as an ‘Expostulation’),and a sea storm ‘painted and given by [Isaac] Salemaker’. Still life was particularlywell represented, with two small flower paintings by Antonio Montingo, anotherby Everbroeck and a larger flower piece ‘painted and given by [John] Baptist[Monnoyer] in a carved Guilt Frame’, a piece of ‘fowles and fruit in a Carved GuiltFrame being still life painted by Mr Van Zoons’, and another unspecified still life‘painted and given by Ronsestratton [Pieter Gerritsz. van Roestraten]’. Otherworks, including another landscape with a ruin by ‘Eyebright’, spilled onto theadjacent stairs, while still more had to be ‘sett by’.58

The impression given by these various documents is of a hall crowded withpictures, where religious and allegorical history painting, portraiture, landscapeand still life formed an evolving display of work by established foreign artists andambitious English painters. Uniquely within the capital, the work of individual

6 John Crowther, Interior View of the Painter–Stainers’ Livery Hall, 1888. Watercolour on paper,

18 � 30 cm. London: Guildhall Library. Photo: Guildhall Library, City of London.



picture-makers vied for the visitor’s attention, not only with that of other artists,but also with an equally impressive display of civic iconography represented bythe work of the City’s arms painters and house painters. From the Company’sarms emblazoned on every chair and fire bucket to the pillars and pilasters‘painted in imitation of Porphory with gilded Capitals’, to the myriad of framedpaintings on the walls, the building’s impressive interior, crowned by Fuller’selaborate ceiling, exemplified the diverse skills of every branch of the trade, andart, of painting during the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In this way, thebuilding became an environment in which, for the first time, the pictorial skillsof aspiring English painters could be viewed and evaluated alongside the work oftheir foreign counterparts. A late nineteenth-century watercolour and a rarephotograph of the interior at Little Trinity Lane (plates 6 and 7) provide a valuableglimpse of the building that was destroyed in 1941.59 Although made some timeafter the disappearance of Fuller’s allegorical ceiling, John Crowther’s water-colour view vividly represents the frame-to-frame display of pictures that definedthe Company’s post-fire headquarters (including a number of identifiable paint-ings that had been in the Hall since the seventeenth century). And while EdwardHatton’s description of the Painter–Stainers’ Company in 1710, as an organizationcomprising ‘Face Painters, History Painters, Arms Painters and House Painters’,may have given a misleading impression of the actual membership of the

7 The Painter–Stainers’ Livery Hall, London, c. 1917. Photo: Bedford, Lemere & Co., courtesy

Guildhall Library, City of London.



Company, which maintained a largely artisanal profile throughout the nextcentury, it did reflect more accurately the image of the Company conveyed by thepictorial spectacle that greeted visitors to its Hall.60

PICTOR PENICULARIUS

It is within this environment that the early reception of Robert Aggas’s oversizedlandscape painting can be understood. The very fact that Aggas’s workwas recognizable to Uffenbach and other visitors as a ‘landscape’ of someworth, in the absence of an established tradition of native landscape painting,depended to a large degree on its propitious inclusion on the picture-laden wallsof the Painter–Stainers’ Hall – an environment that registered the artist’s privi-leged status as an English painter on home ground, but which at the same timelocated the image within a cosmopolitan display of genre-defined easel painting.

As well as tailoring his work towards apopular, Continental tradition oflandscape painting, Aggas evidentlyalso sought to distinguish his workfrom that of the strangers in a directway. It was, at the time of its making,among the very largest of all thepaintings in the hall, rivalled in sizeand format only by the prestigiousfull-length royal portraits that hadbeen commissioned by the Companyin 1676 (plate 8, for example).61 Assuch, Aggas’s landscape enjoyed aprominence within the heavily deco-rated hall that was matched only bythe king himself.

As has been noted, eighteenth-century readers found a textual affir-mation of Aggas’s artistic status inBuckeridge’s Essay. Here, the author’sambitious claims for Aggas’s achieve-ments as a landscape painter could beassessed on the page as part of abiographical compendium of artists’lives, alongside the likes of Coloni,Van Diest, Wyck and others, many ofwhom had benefited from an associa-tion with the Painter–Stainers’Company and given a painting for itsHall. Furthermore, if Buckeridge’s

rhetorical focus on Aggas’s ‘natural Genius’ over ‘Labour and Industry’ empha-sized the painter’s artistic and intellectual credentials while simultaneouslyplaying down the mechanical aspects of his trade, the same author also recog-nized the cultural authority of the Painter–Stainers’ Company by acknowledgingits Hall as a place where the work of an English picture-maker could be seen at its

8 John Baptist Gaspars, King Charles II, c. 1676.

Oil on canvas, 221 � 137 cm. London: Painters’

Hall. Photo: The Worshipful Company of

Painter–Stainers.



best. The use of the phrase Pictor penicularius (literally ‘painter with a pencil’,meaning ‘with a fine brush’) in the inscription that accompanied Aggas’s land-scape fulfilled a similar dual purpose, at once distinguishing the artist’s workfrom the broad-brushed, artisanal practice of the house painter or scene painter,and rather grandly drawing attention to the presence of such elevated works atthe historical home of London’s painting trade. Indeed, Aggas’s posthumousreputation, ranking him ‘among the best of our English Landskip Painters’, owed asmuch to the physical and ideological circumstances of his painting’s display, andto the successive visual and textual framing of the image, as it did to the artist’sunmistakable proficiency with the brush.

Ultimately, the success with which Aggas negotiated the artistic opportunitiesof the Painter–Stainers’ Hall is demonstrated by the way Landscape at Sunsetcommanded the favourable attention of viewers like Uffenbach and Buckeridge,and by the singular importance of the painting in establishing the artist’s repu-tation as a leading figure of an incipient ‘English school’. It was, however, areputation that relied on the continued prominence of the Company and itsCity headquarters within the capital’s cultural imagination. Little over a yearafter Uffenbach recorded his visit to Little Trinity Lane, the inaugurationand immediate success of the first of London’s independent artists’ academies,under the cosmopolitan leadership of Godfrey Kneller, presented a decisivechallenge to the Painter–Stainers’ Company. Not only did the promise of livemodels in the drawing rooms at Great Queen Street prove irresistible to thecapital’s ambitious younger painters,62 but the inclusion of engravers and non-professional ‘lovers of art’ among the academy’s subscribers also gave London’sgrowing artistic community access to a cultural and commercial network thatthe old Company could not hope to rival from behind the City walls.63 By themiddle of the eighteenth century, the City’s Painter–Stainers maintained only asymbolic (if at times important) presence within the contemporary art world,and Aggas’s intrinsic association with the Company served only to excludehim from a fast-evolving canon. In 1765 Horace Walpole, unimpressed by theaugust surroundings of the Company’s Hall and no advocate of an Anglo-Dutchpictorial tradition, unceremoniously returned Aggas to his artisanal roots byrelegating him to a footnote in his Anecdotes of painting in England, where theEnglish painter is described as ‘little more than a scene-painter’.64 Over the nexttwo centuries, Walpole’s aristocratic vision of painting in England proved moreenduring than Buckeridge’s, but for an earlier generation, the Painter–Stainers’Hall in Little Trinity Lane became a place in which reputations could be made andwhere, for the first time, the prospect of an ‘English school of painters’ could beentertained.

Notes

I am indebted to Emily Mann, Mark Hallett and Jeremy Wood, as well as to theeditors and anonymous readers, for their comments and suggestions on variousaspects of this article. My thanks are also extended to Alan Borg, JaneCunningham, Jeremy Smith, Barbara Thompson, Chris Twyman and ArjanZuiderhoek.



1 Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, London in 1710,

from the travels of Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach,

trans. W.H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare, London,

1934, 60–2.

2 Edward Hatton, A New View of London; or, an Ample

Account of that City, London, 1708, 612–13.

3 Brull’s painting is alternatively described in an

eighteenth-century inventory of the Company’s

Hall as ‘Orpheus slaying Pan’ (Terrier of the

Painter–Stainers’ Company (1766), Guildhall

Library MS 11505, 19r). The painting of Art and

Envy was later catalogued as by [Abraham]

Hondius (The Worshipful Company of Painters,

otherwise Painter Stainers: its master, wardens, court

of assistants, and livery, etc., London, 1876, cat. no.

4). Finally, ‘Palmaitier’ may be an alternative

spelling for the French artist Jacques Parmentier,

who first travelled to England in the 1670s (see

George Vertue, ‘Notebooks’, Walpole Society, esp.

22 (Vertue III), 1933–34, 30–1 and 39–40; and

Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in

England 1537–1837, vol. 1, London, 1962, 256).

4 Several of the paintings referred to here and

elsewhere in this article are no longer extant.

Many were destroyed with the Hall during the

1939–45 war; others were lost in a fire while in

storage in 1946. The portrait of Charles II, by John

Baptist Gaspars, and those of Queen Catherine

and William Camden are still in the collection of

the Company. The depiction of the Great Fire is

attributed to ‘Waggoner’ in the Company’s

earliest surviving inventory (Terrier of the

Painter–Stainers’ Company (1723), Guildhall

Library MS 11505, 11v); it was subsequently

engraved by Peter Mazell for Thomas Pennant’s

Of London, London, 1790.

5 [Bainbrigg Buckeridge], An Essay towards an

English School of Painters, appended to Roger de

Piles, The Art of Painting, and the Lives of the Painters:

containing, a compleat treatise of painting, designing,

and the use of prints [trans. John Savage] To which is

added, An essay towards an English-School, London,

1706, 437–38; see also C.H. Collins Baker, Lely and

the Stuart Portrait Painters, London, 1912, vol. 1,

209–219; and Catharine Macleod and Julia

Marciari Alexander, eds, Painted Ladies: Women at

the Court of Charles II, exh. cat., London: National

Portrait Gallery, 2001, esp. cat. nos 12, 24 and 93.

6 In recent years the work of Robert Robinson has

been the subject of important research by James

A. Ganz. See, for example, Fancy Pieces: genre

mezzotints by Robert Robinson and his contemporaries,

exh. cat., New Haven: Yale Center for British Art,

1994; and, for a study of the artist’s painted

room at 32 Botolph Lane, ‘A City Artist: Robert

Robinson’ in Mireille Galinou, ed., City Merchants

and the Arts 1670–1720, London, 2004, 103–118.

Robinson also produced scenery for the Theatre

Royal (see Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration

Drama 1660–1700, Cambridge, 1940 (3rd edn), 382).

For recent scholarship on Francis Barlow, see

Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–

1689, exh. cat., London: British Museum, 1998,esp. 140–3.

7 Those exceptions include Susan Foister’s impor-tant essay, ‘Foreigners at Court: Holbein, VanDyck and the Painter-Stainers Company’ in DavidHowarth, ed., Art and Patronage in the CarolineCourts: essays in honour of Sir Oliver Millar,Cambridge, 1993, 32–50; Stefanie Kollmann,Niederl.andische K.unstler und Kunst im London des 17.Jahrhunderts, Hildesheim, 2000, esp. 23–9; and,most recently, Alan Borg, The History of theWorshipful Company of Painters otherwise PainterStainers, Lindley, 2005. Borg’s extensive newstudy succeeds W.A.D. Englefield’s The History ofthe Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, London,1936 (second issue with addenda) as the officialhistory of the Company.

8 In their pioneering study of auction cataloguesfrom the 1680s and 1690s, Henry and MargaretOgden identify ten references to work for sale by‘Augus’ or ‘August’, although no painting otherthan the Painter–Stainers’ landscape has sincebeen attributed to the artist. See Henry V.S.Ogden and Margaret S. Ogden, English Taste inLandscape in the Seventeenth Century, Ann Arbor,1955, esp. 114–15 and 130.

9 Uffenbach, London in 1710, 60. The inscriptionabove Aggas’s painting was provided by RobertTrevitt, although there has been some confusionover when it was added. Englefield mistakenlydates it to 1712, the year Trevitt served as masterbut two years after Uffenbach’s visit (see Engle-field, The History of the Painter–Stainers’ Company,24). The inscribed tablet is now lost but wasnoted by M.H. Grant in A Chronological History ofthe Old English Landscape Painters (in oil) from theXVIth century to the XIXth century, London, 1926, vol.1, 11–12. Grant transcribed the text slightlydifferently, reading: ‘ROBERTUS AGGAS / PictorPenicularius / Ex Patre Peniculario / Hanc TabulumSubnexam / Pinxit ET Posuit / Ann. MDCLXXIX’. AlanBorg has recently speculated that Aggas mayhave given the painting itself in 1646, when heobtained his freedom (see Borg, The History of theWorshipful Company of Painters, 56). However, adate so early in the painter’s career, and so earlyin the seventeenth century, remains unlikely,not least because it does not tally with theunambiguous date in both recorded versions ofTrevitt’s inscription.

10 Orders and Constitutions of the Painter-Stainers’Company (1623–49), Guildhall Library MS 5667/1,211. For details of Samuel Aggas’s career withinthe Company see Englefield, The History of thePainter–Stainers’ Company, 14 and 224.

11 Orders and Constitutions of the Painter-Stainers’Company (1649–1793) Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 47a.

12 [Buckeridge], An Essay towards an English School ofPainters, 398–9. For a useful discussion of theauthorship and attribution of the Essay, see R.W.Lightbown’s introduction to Bainbrigge Buck-ridge, An Essay towards an English School of Painters,



London, 1754 (3rd edn), facsimile by Cornmarket

Press, London, 1969.

13 The theatre historian Allardyce Nicoll has

discovered two further references to Aggas’sactivities as a scene painter among the Lord

Chamberlain’s papers in the National Archive(LC 5/190 and 5/191). In August 1677 Aggas and

Samuel Towers, another painter, petitioned the

Lord Chamberlain for d40 ‘for worke done in yeTheatre Royall’. The two men requested a further

d32 in December 1682, a date that conflicts withBuckeridge’s suggestion that Aggas had died in

1679. See Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama1660–1700, 41–2.

14 On dry painting, see John Elsum, The Art of

Painting after the Italian Manner, London, 1703, 35–

6. Elsum regarded dry painting as ‘fit only forworks of great expedition, as Scenes, Prospects,

Triumphal Arches, &c.’

15 At the lower end of the trade, professionalpainting could be defined in relatively straight-

forward, legal terms, as exemplified by the

Company’s successful restriction of the City’splasterers to the use of only six colours ‘mingled

with size’, which prohibited a plasterer frompainting his own work in anything but the most

basic way, and which defined oil-based paint andthe mixing of colours as the preserve of the

Painter–Stainers. See Englefield, The History of thePainter–Stainers’ Company, esp. 85–6.

16 Buckeridge’s Essay provided the source for allother biographical references to Aggas in the

eighteenth century. See, for example, JohnBarrow, Dictionarium polygraphicum: or, the whole

body of arts regularly digested, London, 1735, n.p.;and A New and General Biographical Dictionary,

London, 1798, vol. 1, 138.

17 See Ogden and Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in

the Seventeenth Century, esp. 88–93 and 104–133;and Carol Gibson-Wood, ‘Picture Consumption

in London at the End of the SeventeenthCentury’, Art Bulletin, 84:3, September 2002,

491–500.

18 The size of the Painter–Stainers’ painting

(73.7 � 41.9 cm) is recorded by J.D. Crace in ACatalogue of the Pictures, Prints, Drawings, etc., in the

possession of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stai-ners at Painters’ Hall, London, 1908, cat. no. 2.

19 Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar, English Art,1625–1714, Oxford, 1957, 81; see also Iain Pears,

The Discovery of Painting: the growth of interest in thearts in England, 1680–1768, New Haven and

London, 1988, esp. 118–19. The same assumptionis made, though in a far more sophisticated way,

by David Ormrod in ‘The Origins of the LondonArt Market, 1660–1730’, in Michael North and

David Ormrod, eds, Art Markets in Europe, 1400–

1800, Aldershot, 1998, 167–86. Borg’s The History ofthe Worshipful Company of Painters offers a

welcome alternative to this narrative of decline,emphasizing the Company’s role within the civic

affairs of the City of London and its continued

influence over the lives of the capital’s decorative

painters.

20 Roger de Piles, The Art of Painting, and the Lives of

the Painters, 397. See also Julia Marciari Alex-

ander, ‘Beauties, Bawds and Bravura: the critical

history of Restoration portraits of women’, in

Macleod and Alexander, eds, Painted Ladies:

Women at the Court of Charles II, 62–71.

21 The proportion of foreign painters would have

been even higher if Buckeridge had not decided

to confine his attention to those painters who

were no longer alive at the time of writing.

22 I refer, in particular, to the work of David

Ormrod and Carol Gibson-Wood. See, for

example, Ormrod, ‘The Origins of the London Art

Market, 1660–1730’; and ‘Cultural production

and import substitution: the fine and decorative

arts in London, 1660–1730’ in Patrick O’Brien,

ed., Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe:

Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London,

Cambridge, 2001, 210–30; and Gibson-Wood,

‘Picture Consumption in London at the End of

the Seventeenth Century’. Earlier work on the

subject includes Mary Edmond, ‘Limners and

Picturemakers: new light on the lives of minia-

turists and large-scale portrait-painters working

in London in the 16th and 17th centuries’,

Walpole Society, 47, 1980, 60–242; Ogden and

Ogden, English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth

Century; and Pears, The Discovery of Painting.

23 The Painters’ Company was incorporated by

inspeximus from the lord mayor in 1467 and

received a grant of arms in 1486. However,

references to an organized guild of painters date

back to the thirteenth century. The representa-

tive bodies of London’s painters and the less

powerful ‘steynours’ amalgamated in 1502. For

the early history of the Company, see Borg, The

History of the Worshipful Company of Painters, 23–68.

24 Foister, ‘Foreigners at Court’, 32.

25 The petitioners, all portrait painters, were

described by the Company’s clerk in 1640 as

‘professors of that part of our art which they call

to the life’. See Guildhall Library MS 5667/1, 28

and passim; and Foister, ‘Foreigners at Court’, 32–

50. Greenbury later joined the Painter–Stainers,

translating his freedom from the Goldsmiths’

Company. According to Buckeridge, Cross(e) was

a copyist who reproduced several paintings from

Italian collections for Charles I ([Buckeridge], An

Essay towards an English School of Painters, 412–13).

26 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 8b.

27 The term ‘foreign brother’ was also used occa-

sionally to denote an English painter who had

trained abroad or in the provinces.

28 Guildhall Library MS 5667/1, 222.

29 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 23b–25a.

See also [Buckeridge], An Essay towards and English

School of Painters, 400; and Collins Baker, Lely and

the Stuart Portrait Painters, vol. 2, 198.



30 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 40b. TheCourt of Assistants promised to consider theyeomanry’s petition but took no further action.

31 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 185–97.

32 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 71b. TheDutchmen each agreed to submit a ‘Master piece[. . .] to the hall for perpetuitie’ within threemonths. The significance of this order, whichbecame a standard requirement for strangers, isexplored below.

33 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 170; theyounger Wyck also promised to submit a ‘proofpeece’.

34 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 172; and[Buckeridge], An Essay towards and English School ofPainters, 444. See also Robert Raines, MarcellusLaroon, London, 1966, esp. 5–18.

35 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 222 and 227.

36 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 129, 225 and228. The irregular or incomplete spelling of theCompany’s clerk complicates a more preciseidentification of several painters mentioned inthe minutes. For a detailed catalogue of Nether-landish painters working in England during theseventeenth century, see Kollmann, Niederl.an-dische K.unstler und Kunst, esp. 145–287. Of moregeneral interest is Juliette Roding, Eric JanSluijter et al., eds, Dutch and Flemish Artists inBritain 1550–1800, Leiden, 2003.

37 Kneller also donated his portrait of William III

which still hangs in the Painter–Stainers’ Hall(see Guildhall Library MS 11505, 18r). The activ-ities and iconography of the Society of Paintersare discussed further in Richard Johns, ‘JamesThornhill and Decorative History Painting inEngland since 1688’, unpublished PhD thesis,University of York, 2004, esp. 48–51.

38 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 272;Vanspreat also promised a proof piece as acondition of his admittance. The apprenticesbound to Vanspreat (also known as Vanderspritt,Vandespreat etc.) between 1688 and 1692 appearin the Company’s Register of Apprentice Bind-ings (1666–1795), Guildhall Library MS 5669/1,passim. The register has been published by theSociety of Genealogists as London Livery CompanyApprenticeship Registers, vol. 38: Painter–Stainers’Company 1655, 1666–1800, London, 2003.

39 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 19a. Therewere at least three painters with the nameFlusheere, or Flesshier(s), living in England at thetime, probably all sons of the Dutch painterBalthasar Flesshier. Mary Beale, in a journal latertranscribed by George Vertue, referred to ‘MrFlessiere the frame maker’ in February 1680(O.S.); and Vertue himself recalled a ‘Fleshire’who lived near the Fountain Tavern in the Strand(see George Vertue, ‘Notebooks’, Walpole Society,20 (Vertue II), 1931–32, 89 and 24 (Vertue IV),1935–36, 175. Buckeridge refers to ‘Mr Flesheer’only once, as a former master of MarcellusLauron ([Buckeridge], An Essay towards an EnglishSchool of Painters, 444). The Witt Library records a

single picture by ‘B. Flesshire’, a portrait ofWilliam Woodyeare, signed and dated 1666. Seealso Collins Baker, Lely and the Stuart PortraitPainters, vol. 2, 197; and Kollmann, Niederl.andischeK.unstler und Kunst, 195.

40 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 19a, 23a and53b.

41 In 1674 Flusheere was joined as stranger assis-tant by John Baptist Gaspars. The two menparticipated in Company searches and, inNovember 1680, were both appointed to a revivedCommittee of Acting Painters – a working groupformed to address the day-to-day concerns of thetrade. See, for example, Guildhall Library MS5667/2 (part 1), 171, 253 and 258.

42 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 213. Part-nering Flusheere was Daniel Savile, a formermaster of the Company. It is not clear whetherSavile regarded himself as a picture-maker, or asupporter who owed his place on the committeeto his seniority. However, Samuel Pepys makesseveral mentions in his diary of a portraitpainter by the name of ‘Savill’, to whom he andhis wife sat in 1661–62. See Robert Latham andWilliam Matthews, eds, The Diary of Samuel Pepys,London, 1970, vols 2 (1661) and 3 (1662), passim.

43 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 238.

44 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 108a and303.

45 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 217. Thecommittee was ordered to meet on the firstWednesday of each month, when the master andwardens also met to bind new apprentices.

46 Streeter and the strangers were joined on thecommittee by the serving master and wardens,and three former masters.

47 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 228; and[Buckeridge], An Essay towards an English School ofPainters, 463. Allardyce Nicoll also notesStephenson’s employment as a scene painter, inA History of Restoration Drama 1660–1700, 42. Heserved as renter warden of the Company in 1678.

48 Fuller brought his proposal to the Court ofAssistants on 9 March 1680 (O.S.), and was paidd75 for the completed work the followingFebruary. See Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part1), 228 and 259–62.

49 Hatton, A New View of London, 612–13. A similardescription of the ceiling is included in theCompany’s inventory of 1766 (Guildhall LibraryMS 11505, 18r).

50 Several descriptions of Streeter’s Sheldonianceiling were published following its installationin 1669. See, for example, Robert Whitehall,Urania, or a Description of the Painting of the Top ofthe Theater at Oxon, London, 1669; and RobertPlot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire, Oxford, 1677,279–81.

51 Notionally, at least, the presentation of a proofpiece satisfied one of the Company’s oldest rules,confirmed in a Latin inspeximus of 1466, that noperson be admitted who had not completed a



seven-year apprenticeship ‘without he be duly

examined and proved for cunning and able by

eight or six honest persons of the craft’. The

inspeximus, still in the possession of the

Company, is summarized in English in Engle-

field, The History of the Painter–Stainers Company,

49–52.


53 [Buckeridge], An Essay towards an English School ofPainters, 468–9; Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part1), 228. The Company clerk noted of Vandest that‘he lives with Vanbeck in Durham Yard.’


55 Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 268. Earlier,in October 1677 (224), the Court of Assistants hadforbidden the removal of any ‘master pieces’from the hall for the purposes of copying.Certain unnamed painters had, it seems, takento borrowing (perhaps permanently) these piecesfor their own use.

56 Vertue visited the hall in or around 1727, bywhich time the collection included works byPeter Monamy and Louis Laguerre (both stillextant), Sebastiano Ricci and John Baptist deMedina. See George Vertue, ‘Notebooks’ (VertueII), 1931–32, 30. Later lists of pictures in the hall(including those lost during the 1940s) areincluded in The Worshipful Company of Painters,otherwise Painter Stainers: its master, wardens, courtof assistants, and livery, etc., London, 1876; Crace, ACatalogue of the Pictures, Prints, Drawings, etc.; andW. Hayward Pitman, The Worshipful Company ofPainters, otherwise Painter Stainers: its hall, pictures,and plate, London, 1913 (3rd edn).

57 Guildhall Library MS 11505. The first inventory,now badly damaged, was begun by Robert Trevittduring his term as master in 1712–13 butcompleted after his death a decade later. A tran-script of the surviving portions of the 1723 docu-ment is included as an appendix to Borg’s TheHistory of the Worshipful Company of Painters, 199–206.

58 Guildhall Library MS 11505, esp. 9–14 and 15–21.For Lauron’s Expostulation, see Crace, A Catalogueof the Pictures, Prints, Drawings, etc., cat. no. 29.

59 The photograph, taken c. 1917, shows the hallshortly after the construction of an extension,during which the doorway and gallery weremoved to the side.

60 Hatton, A New View of London, 613.

61 For a summary of the royal portraits in the hall,see Englefield’s The History of the Painter–Stainers’Company, 146.

62 Life drawing had long been proscribed withinthe Painter–Stainers’ Hall. A request to use theHall for ‘draweinge to the life’ was denied in1656 (Guildhall Library MS 5667/2 (part 1), 46).See also Johns, ‘James Thornhill and DecorativeHistory Painting’, 43–4.

63 The phrase ‘lovers of art’ is used frequently byGeorge Vertue, who was a member of Kneller’sacademy. The inauguration of the Great QueenStreet academy, on 18 October 1711, representedan implicit challenge for precedence over thePainter–Stainers. It was St Luke’s Day, feast day ofthe patron saint of painters, and the traditionalelection day of the Company.

64 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of painting in England;with some account of the principal artists, Twick-enham, 1765–80, vol. 3, 51.



framing robert aggas: the painter–stainers' company and the ‘english school of painters’

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