Steven van der Meulen

[1][4][5] In 1561 the English merchant John Dymocke or Dymoch visited Sweden in connection with negotiations for a marriage between Elizabeth and Erik XIV, taking with him a Netherlandish painter (holländsk Konterfegare[6]) described as 'Master Staffan' to paint the portrait of the King.

[9] Scholar Elizabeth Drey discovered van der Meulen's will, dated 5 October 1563 during an epidemic of the plague in London and proved on 20 January 1564.

[5] Many works confidently attributed to van der Meulen by Sir Roy Strong and others from the 1960s through the mid-2000s must be reevaluated in the light of the discovery that he died in 1563.

Called by Strong the "Barrington Park" type after a representative example, these sophisticated portraits are probably a response to a proclamation of 1563, which was designed to counter the existence of many unflattering images of the Queen.

[14] This new identification was accepted by a number of institutions, such as Historic Royal Palaces, Tate Britain and the V&A, who exhibited the full-length Hampden portrait of Elizabeth I as attributed to van Herwijck.

In her 2014 study of the portraiture and patronage of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth Goldring raised concerns with identification of van Herwijck as the "paynter Steven".