John de Critz

He was apprenticed to the artist and poet Lucas de Heere, also from Antwerp, who may have taught members of the Gheeraerts family and Robert Peake as well.

Other painters from the family include John the Elder's sons Emmanuel (1608–65), who also worked for the court, and Thomas (1607–53), to whom many portraits of their Tradescant relations are now attributed.

[10] The role of the serjeant painter was elastic in its definition of duties: it involved not just the painting of original portraits but of their reproductions in new versions, to be sent to other courts.

[11] In August 1606 de Critz was paid £53-6s-8d for full length portraits of James, Anne of Denmark, and Prince Henry to send to the Archduke of Austria.

[7] On one side was his bill for work on a sun-dial: For several times oyling and laying with fayre white a stone for a sun-dyall opposite to some part of the king and queen’s lodgings, the lines thereof being drawn in severall colours, the letters directing to the bowers guilded with fine gould, as alsoe the glory, and a scrowle guilded with fine gould, whereon the number and figures specifying the planetary howers are inscribed; likewise certain letters drawne in black informing in what part of the compasse the sun at any time there shining shall be resident; the whole worke being circumferenced with a frett painted in a manner of a stone one, the compleat measure of the whole being six foote.On the other side is a demand for payment for work on the royal barge: John De Critz demaundeth allowance for these parcells of Worke following, viz.

[14] De Critz gilded Maximilian Colt's marble effigy for the tomb of Elizabeth I, completed in 1606, which had been painted by Nicholas Hilliard.

[17] De Critz and his workshop painted heraldic banners for the funeral of Anne of Denmark in 1619, which were displayed at her lying in state at Somerset House and at Westminster Abbey.

[19] Walpole said of de Critz that "His life is to be collected rather from office-books than from his works or his reputation"; and the comparative mundanity of some of the tasks he undertook has led to a downplaying of the artistic role of the serjeant-painter.

[6] A Burlington Magazine editorial remarked: "A great deal of easy fun has been poked at the institution of the serjeant-painters, because these had to attend to tasks such as downright house-painting, the painting of barges and coaches, the provision of banners and streamers, and so on".

Elizabethan and Jacobean portrait painters often made multiple versions not only of their own paintings but of those of their predecessors and contemporaries, and rarely signed their work.

The art historian and critic Sir John Rothenstein summed up the problems: To make definitive attributions is a difficult undertaking.

Another confusing factor is the tendency on the part of members of the artistic families to intermarry with one another; Marc Gheeraerts the elder and his son and namesake, for example, both married sisters of John de Critz.

[21]As part of the monarchy's advancement of its political and dynastic aims, copies of standard portraits were required for presentation as gifts and transmission to foreign embassies.