John Souch

He flourished in the early seventeenth century in the North West of England, and perhaps epitomises the role of art in English local life at that time.

John Souch was baptised on 3 February 1593/4 at Ormskirk, Lancashire[1] In 1607, he was apprenticed (at the age of fourteen) for a term of ten years to Randle Holme I, the Chester Herald painter and antiquary.

However, the more talented herald painters sometimes branched out into portraiture, to satisfy a growing market for images to record betrothals, births, and (sometimes) deaths.

Although based in Chester, he became, after the manner of the time, a peripatetic painter, travelling to client's houses within an area bounded by Shropshire to the South and Yorkshire to the North, and undertaking commissions, either heraldic or portraiture, on the spot.

[3] In common with many of his contemporaries, Souch adopted a two dimensional style, in which linear form and decoration were to the fore, rather than modelling, depth, or perspective.

Souch himself may have undertaken artistic training in the Netherlands at some stage in his career, and some art historians claim to have detected the influence of Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen.