John Browne was succeeded as Serjeant Painter by Andrew Wright. This painter received £30 for painting and decorating the King’s barge. He had a manufactory of “pink,” a vegetable pigment used by painters at that time; it was the Italian giallo santo and the French stel de grain. Wright died in 1543.
Vincent Volpe, a contemporary of the two preceding, supplied, in 1514, streamers and banners for the King’s great ship, the Henry Grace à Dieu. He is called in 1530 the “King’s Painter.” It is suggested that it was Volpe who painted some of the military pictures at Hampton Court. He also received money for the decoration of the King’s barge. The “King’s Painter” seems to have held a higher rank than the Serjeant Painter, for Volpe’s salary was £10 a year.
Two other Flemish artists, Lucas and Gerard Horenbout, were also in the receipt of salaries from the King; their father was also, perhaps, a painter and a Fleming. Their sister Susanna was a painter of miniatures. She was the wife, first, of Henry Parker the King’s bowman, and, secondly, of a sculptor named Worsley.
An Italian named Antonio Toto was a native of Florence, the son of a painter and the pupil of Ridolpho. He was architect as well as painter. His principal building was the strange palace of Nonsuch (see [p. 89]). Toto was, like Andrew Wright, a Serjeant Painter. For the coronation of Edward VI. he provided the tabards for the heralds; he also took charge of the masques.
Another Italian attached to Henry’s Court was Bartolomo Penni. The names of three women have been given above: Alice Carmillion was in Henry’s service; Levina Terling in Edward’s, Mary’s, and Elizabeth’s successively.
Holbein’s most illustrious successor among his contemporaries was Guillim Streets, or Strettes. Among other paintings by this admirable artist was one of the marriage of Queen Mary. The picture, however, is lost.
Nicholas Lyzarde was Serjeant Painter to Queen Elizabeth. He died in 1571.
The names Antonio Moro and Joost van Cleef may also be added to those of the painters who lived in London during the sixteenth century.
The decay of the London schools and of learning in general, which undoubtedly began in the fifteenth century and continued until far into the following century, is difficult to understand. One can only form theories and make guesses. The fact cannot be disputed. There were forces at work which have not been recorded. The Lollardry of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries seems to have been in great measure forgotten. Yet, as I have pointed out and proved, the custom of making bequests to the Religious Houses declined and decayed until it quite died away, long before the Reformation. The old spirit of revolt left behind it a steady and persistent and growing spirit of dissatisfaction. Perhaps this spirit was shown in the decay of the monastic schools. We have seen how, in 1477, four of the London clergy asked, and obtained, permission to found additional schools in four parishes. The new schools could do little; the Reformation accelerated the decay of learning partly by the abolition of the monastic schools; partly by the vast reduction in the number of ecclesiastics; partly by the loss of the endowments by which learning had been encouraged and maintained: an increased trade, with foreign enterprise, also attracted the younger men in numbers continually increasing. So few were the undergraduates of Oxford that in Queen Mary’s reign only three took a degree in Divinity during the space of six years; in Civil Law only eleven; in Physic six; in Arts an average of about twenty-three. Anthony à Wood writes: “There were none that had any heart to put their children to any school, any farther than to learn to write—to make them Apprentices or Lawyers.”
