The age of the photograph made this available to the masses and now digital photography has allowed people to take thousands of images on their phone.Ī great portrait painter can do something that a photograph cannot. Portraiture throughout history has been practices by all of the great masters.įrom the as far back as the Egyptian pharaohs through to the great Renaissance, portrait painting was the method for recording and capturing the human face for centuries. Paul Holberton Publishing, 72pp, £14.What makes a great portrait artist is more than just painting a good likeness of the model, it is in fact capturing the essence of what makes a person ‘that’ person.
Susan Jenkins is a curator and researcher who has written extensively on 17th- and 18th-century fine and decorative arts. He may not have had the virtuosic skills of Van Dyck but Johnson’s work was widely enough admired for him to die a wealthy man. Hearn attributes Johnson’s success to his networking skills (particularly within the Dutch community at Austin Friars in London), his technical ability, modest prices and pragmatic response to market demand, together with his willingness to collaborate and ability to reinvent his national identity. His popular portrait miniatures were produced using an unusual technique of oil on metal. Despite his royal preferment, Johnson received few commissions from the king, although his three small full-length portraits of the king’s eldest children, painted in 1639 (now at the National Portrait Gallery in London), must have been ordered by Charles. He was popular with clients such as Thomas, 1st Baron Coventry (1578-1640), Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and Sir Robert Heath, Lord Chief Justice (1575-1649), becoming painter “of choice for individuals who had risen from the ‘middling sort’” and who, according to Hearn, “wished to mark their appointment to…office by commissioning a portrait”. Johnson’s first full-length portraits are signed and dated 1625. Johnson’s meticulous technique is exemplified in his careful depiction of jewellery, probably influenced by his brother-in-law Nicasius Russel, who was a goldsmith. Such a format was an intelligent strategy for an artist entering a new market, as Hearn points out, because it was quick to paint and inexpensive to commission. He frequently portrayed sitters in a trompe l’oeil oval painted to imitate a stone niche, notably Tate Britain’s Susanna Temple, Later Lady Lister (1620) and the Unknown Lady (1619) at the Yale Center for British Art. In 1643, following the outbreak of civil war, he moved to the northern Netherlands, where he continued to practise portraiture, dying 20 years later in Utrecht.Ĭornelius Johnson shows how the artist was appreciated for his “neat finishing and smooth painting” (according to the British writer Bainbrigg Buckeridge in 1706). Unfortunately for Johnson, his reputation in England was eclipsed by Van Dyck’s success. He may have trained in the studio of Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn in The Hague or Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt in Delft, and his technique and sensitivity make him (almost) a worthy rival to his contemporary Van Dyck. Born in Britain to Flemish parents, he was the first British painter regularly to sign his work. She has produced a short, readable book-to accompany a one-room display of his portraits last year at the National Portrait Gallery, London-that provides a chronological assessment of the artist’s career.Ĭharacterised as “Charles I’s other portrait painter”, Johnson was appointed “his Majesty’s servant in ye quality of Picture Drawer” in 1632. 
The focus of Hearn’s latest scholarship is the life and work of the portraitist Cornelius Johnson (1593-1661), known in the Netherlands as Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen. Karen Hearn, a former curator at Tate Britain, is an expert on their work and has brought much new information to light, particularly in her ground-breaking exhibition Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630 (Tate Britain, 1995). Artists from the Netherlands-the predecessors and contemporaries of Van Dyck-were the finest portrait painters in 17th-century England.
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