[1] George Vertue's opinion was that only intemperance and extravagance prevented Vanderbank from being the greatest portraitist of his generation, his lifestyle bringing him into repeated financial difficulties and leading to an early death at the age of only 45.

[2] Vanderbank was born in London on 9 September 1694 into an artistic family, the eldest son of Sarah and John Vanderbank Snr, a naturalised Huguenot immigrant from Paris and, since 1679, well-to-do proprietor of the Soho Tapestry Manufactory and Yeoman Arras-maker to the Great Wardrobe, supplying the royal family with tapestries from his premises in Great Queen Street, Covent Garden.

He used a bold pigmentation in the flesh where pink tones are painted thinly over the cooler greys of the ground layer to suggest glowing skin, the technique of colori cangianti derived from Rubens who was himself inspired by the artists of the seicento.

[13] Moreover in leading the academy Vanderbank was at the centre of an influential artistic hub enjoying the patronage of the wealthiest aristocrats, largely responsible for shaping the taste and cultural life of England in the 1720s and 1730s, encompassing art, architecture, music and the landscape.

Vanderbank was a frequent concert goer, drawing a caricature of Senesino, Cuzzoni and Berenstadt in a scene from Handel's Flavio in 1723,[18] which was anonymously etched and engraved, and in the same year painting the portrait of the leading soprano, and later contralto, Anastasia Robinson, Countess of Peterborough, of which Faber produced a popular mezzotint in 1727.

From 1729 John Vanderbank occupied a house in Holles Street, Cavendish Square, rent-free thanks to the generous patronage of Lord Carteret who, however, appropriated the contents of his studio after his death.

Vanderbank painted three allegorical subjects incorporating an equestrian portrait of George I for the decoration of the staircase at 11 Bedford Row, London, and contributed The Apotheosis, or, Death of the King (1727) to the series of ten paintings by various artists, including Chéron and Pieter Angelis, engraved in 1728 and advertised by John Bowles as Ten Prints of the Reign of King Charles the First.

By contrast, some of Vanderbank's later portraits of ‘persons of Quality’, male or female, are technically well painted but can betray a lack of rapport with his sitters and a tendency to rely on stock poses sometimes directly derived from Van Dyck.

Having married a wife with a fortune, he purchased the late Charles Jervas's house in Cleveland Court, Bath, and thus inherited a fashionable practice.

[8] That Vanderbank succeeded in remaining in the first rank of portraitists in the 1720s and again in the 1730s in spite of his intemperance, sometimes producing outstanding works of art, testifies to the accuracy of Vertue's opinion.

Vanderbank died of consumption (tuberculosis) in Holles Street on 23 December 1739 aged 45 and was buried in St Marylebone Parish Church, Westminster.