Updated database: Early Modern British Painters, c.1500-1640 by Robert Tittler
Self-portrait by Sir Nathaniel Bacon, country gentleman and painter, c.1625. © National Portrait Gallery, London
This resource identifies all those men and women who have been identified as painters of any sort working in England, Wales, Scotland or Ireland between the years 1500 and 1640. It includes those who were native to the British Isles and also those strangers who came and worked there at any time during this era. It also includes those whom contemporary occupational descriptions refer to as pursuing any specialty within the general category of ‘painter’ including, e.g., ‘limner’, ‘picture-painter’, ‘glass-painter’, ‘herald painter’, ‘manuscript illuminator’, etc. Each entry indicates, wherever possible, names with alternate spellings, places of origin and of residence, contemporary occupational description, dates of life and/or of activity, details of training, known works, and general biographical information. Each entry is also accompanied by a list of sources for further reference, and by the identity of those who researched that name.
This edition replaces that of July, 2018. It contains 2,786 entries, seventy-four of which are new, plus additions or corrections to nearly three hundred other entries, all of which are drawn from research in London and several counties.
See the database and further details here >>
Comments
Dear Robert Tittler — we exchanged emails a couple years ago now. (How research eats up the time!) I’m searching for one ‘Belford’ or ‘Bilford’, fl. 1610, who apparently was attached to Henry Wotton in Venice. John Chamberlain writes from London in November 1612 that Wotton has arrived home (after being recalled as ambassador in December 1610) and is attending at court ‘among other suitors’. ‘He hath lessened his train, having no more about him but … Master Morton [Wotton’s nephew] is retired to his college at Cambridge, Master Parkhurst [his private secretary in Venice] into Kent and BILFORD he hath preferred to the Prince [Henry], with asseveration and wagers of three of his choice pictures against three ofthe princes horses that he shall draw or pourtray the Prince better than Issach [Isaac Oliver] the French painter in the Blackfriars: but the common opinion is that he must have many graines of allowance to hold weight with Isaake.’ In 1610, Thomas Coryate, then in Venice, mentioned ‘one of’ Wotton’s ‘principal gentlemen, Master BELFORD his secretary who ‘conveyed me safely’ from the near riot he’d provoked in the Jewish ghetto.
Do you have any information about this Bilford/Belford?
all the best
cr
I can fill in more about [Edward] Barwick, heraldic painter. He was born around 1620, the youngest of five brothers of a farmer of Witherslack in the Lake District Peninsulas. The two elder brothers inherited the farms; the third and fourth were sent to Sedbergh School to be educated; he ‘having obtained a Competency of School-Learning, was sent up to London, and put Apprentice to a Herald-Painter; in which Business he used so much Industry and Application, and searched with such Diligence into the Antiquities of Families, and Knowledge of their several Arms, that he excelled most at that Art’. His two middle brothers, John and Peter, went on the Cambridge: one became Dean of St Paul’s, and the other Physician in Ordinary to King Charles II. Unfortunately when the Civil War broke out, he and his family were Royalists, and he and brother John were imprisoned in the Gatehouse at Westminster for espionage. He was released, but his health had broken, and he died soon after, some time in 1650, of consumption and the stone. See Hilkiah Bedford’s translation of Peter Barwick’s Latin ‘Life of the Reverend Dr. John Barwick’ (1724).