A Painter’s London:
The World of Clouded in Clerkenwell
Welcome to the shadows of seventeenth-century London. Clouded in Clerkenwell begins in the biting winter cold of December 1641, as the Thames is frozen over and the country is poised on the edge of a bloody civil war. At the dark lip of the swollen River Fleet, a painter’s apprentice frantically casts away lavish jewellery belonging to a dead man, as fast as his hands will let him.
What follows is a four-week scramble to run a fraudulent studio, secure royal favour, and outmanoeuvre the hangman’s reach.
Before you meet him, let me show you the London he's standing in.
SECTION ONE
Life as an English Painter
Pierfrancesco Alberti, An Academy of Painters, 1600–38. Etching, 41.2 x 52.2 cm., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/369583
In 1641, if you wanted to commission a masterpiece in London, you would not commission an English painter. You hired a stranger painter.
That was the term for Dutch, Flemish, and Italian masters who had trained in continental academies and settled in England. Educated at art academies such as the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, these artists arrived in London with refined technical skills.
Their curriculum included copying after classical sculptures from antiquity, drawing from life and studying human corpses and skeletons to learn anatomy. They arrived in London with the essential artistic skills that English painters could not rival, and as a result they were awarded the commissions worth having. It would be another 128 years before English painters could elevate their skills and status in the eyes of the royal court by attending the Schools of the Royal Academy.
English painters, especially those working under the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, resented the situation bitterly.
Clouded in Clerkenwell, lives inside that resentment. Antonis van Laken is a Dutch face painter with a gift and no legitimate standing. Henry Kentridge is a West Country apprentice who can grind a colour and forge a signature but will never, as an Englishman, be allowed a career at court. One of them has the talent. The other was born in the right place. Neither has any money. Meanwhile, their master, whose fall from royal favour has left the studio in a precarious position with mounting debts.
All of this changes when a fateful studio accident changes the course of their lives.
Now they must work together to survive.
SECTION TWO
The Impact of Van Dyck’s Death
Anthony Van Dyck, Self-Portrait, 1620-21. Oil on canvas, 119.7 x 87.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436258
On 9 December 1641, Sir Anthony van Dyck died at forty-two, and every ambitious painter in London recognised the vacuum he left behind.
No stranger painter was more successful than Sir Anthony van Dyck. Charles I granted him a magnificent studio at Blackfriars, a generous pension and the title of Principal Painter in Ordinary to His Majesty. The king even built a private stone causeway on the Thames so he could regularly visit the Flemish painter’s studio.
Van Dyck completely transformed English portraiture with his characteristic elongated figures, graceful hands, and luminous fabrics. He had invented how the English court wished to see itself and how painters could be perceived in England. Before Van Dyck, painters were seen as skilled craftspeople rather than high-status individuals or creative geniuses. But upon his arrival, he became the first artist in Britain to achieve celebrity-like status.
And then, in the space of a single winter week in 1641, he was gone, and the most lucrative position in art was suddenly vacant.
This enticing gap is where Clouded in Clerkenwell begins. Van Dyck's death is the starting pistol. Across the city and Europe, painters realised the stage was now empty, and whoever was going to take his place would go to whoever was boldest, best-connected, or most willing to lie. Henry and Antonis have no connections and no scruples left. But they do have a fraudulent studio, a concealed body, and four weeks to win over the King before anyone uncovers the truth.
SECTION THREE
Training a Painter’s Hand and Eye
Unlike the idealised version of the painter sat alone in his studio surrounded by the trappings of an intellectual life (see above), a realistic account of painter’s studio in the seventeenth was a bustling space, where several painters collaborated.
Collaboration was speciifcally an inhernent part of painting likenesses. The terms ‘portrait’, ‘portraiture’ and ‘portrait painter’ were relatively new words emerging from the French language during this period. Before these terms were widely used, artists who painted likenesses were typically referred to as face painters, easel painters and picture drawers. Painting likenesses was the commercial backbone of studios in seventeenth-century England.
Face painters usually painted their subjects in a strictly prescribed manner as part of a collaborative endeavour. In fact, the master rarely executed a canvas alone. The labour was instead divided in the following ways:
1. Apprentices: Ground colours, stretched canvas, and prepared grounds.
2. Studio Assistants: Sketched the overall compositions, laid down a monochrome ‘dead-colouring’ as an underlayer, and painted drapery.
3. Collaborators: Were independent painters who specialised in landscape backgrounds or animals, which were more common on the continent.
4. Studio Master: Swept in for the final process to paint the face and often the hands. Or sometimes, they simply provided the final touches and flourishes. Paintings were considered theirs because they oversaw the whole process and owned the studio.
For Henry Kentridge, a provincial English apprentice, working a small studio means limited time to develop his artistic eye and hands. In addition to studio duties, he also runs the household, cooks the meals, and balances the deceptive ledgers of his failing master. He worries becuase is only desire is to return to Exeter to open his own studio. But he needs to gain enough skills to paint samples of his work to impress the guild back home.
It is only through his realtionship with head assistance Antonis Van Laken that he begins to learn the true art of the craft. When something looks wrong, when the hand knows the motion before the mind holds the idea, and the true cost of taking risks. It is how he survives what he does. The question is: can he live with himself?
Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Interior of a Painter's Studio, 1630. Oil on panel, 58 × 81 cm, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2020.407. https://collections.mfa.org/objects/692550/interior-of-a-painters-studio
SECTION FOUR
Art & The Dead
Title-page to Helkiah Crooke, Microkosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man, second edition (London, R.C., sold by John Clarke, 1651), 1896,1230.238. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
In 1641, the line between art and death was thin.
Studying anatomy including attending dissections was a part of a painter’s education since the early Renaissnce. In the seventeenth century, it is likely that students of academies such as the Accademia di San Luca, frequently attended live cadavar dissections by leading surgeons at the nearby Hospital of Santo Spirito in Sassia. While artists without access to such academies could attend public venues, such as the Theatrum Anatomicum, or Leiden’s Anatomical Theatre, which has been reconstructed at the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave.
The first public anatomy dissection in England took place in 1638 in London at the Barber-Surgeons' Anatomy Theatre, which was designed by Inigo Jones. It is likley that artists were permitted entry to study.
Dr Helkiah Crooke, royal physician to James I, was a pupil of the anatomy professor, Pieter Paaw, at Leiden University. After returing to England and graduating at Cambridge, he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1613 and published Mikrokosmographia, a Description of the Body of Man in 1615. It was the first anatomy book that had been written in English, rather than Latin. It received criticism because it allowed srurgons, without a classical education, access to illustrations of the reproductive body parts. , the accompanying illustrations were not original. Instead, according to Jillian Linster, almost every illustration of discections was sourced from Caspar Bauhin’s 1605, Theatrum Anatomicum published in Frankfurt.
Crooke seemed to be more interested in ensuring anatomical knowledge was disseminated to English surgeons, rather than originality. And as a result the book was enormously successful and was reprinted. His new status led to his disasterous tenure as Keeper of the Bethlem Hosptial, which ended when he was removed from office by Charles I.
The expensive new editions of his book and the legal proceedings at Bethlem Hospital were costly. He sold his fellowship back to the College of Physicians for £5 and resigned his place on 25 May 1635. After this, it would have been difficult for him to commission artists to create woodcuts or engraving and gain access to bodies to dissect.
This dilemma is where Clouded in Clerkenwell starts. Two artists who need to get rid of a body and an anatomist who needs two artists to illustrate his new edition. But will they each keep their end of the bargain?
SECTION FIVE
A City in Chaos
Wenceslaus Hollar, The true maner [manner] of the execution of Thomas Earle of Strafford, 1641. Etching, plate: 18.6 × 26.4 cm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, object number: 17.3.3280.https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/360634
The year of 1641 was the last held breath before the English Civil War.
Riots were a frequent occurrence London, in a city that was about to tear itself apart.
In March, Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud was impeached and ordered to be imprisoned in the Tower of London. To avoid scenes, officials tried to sneak him across London in a coach at midday. But he was spotted in Cheapside and the alarm was raised. A massive crowd of shouting apprentices quickly swarmed the coach, jeering him and mockingly pelted the Archbishop with mud and leeks.
In May, the King's chief advisor, the Earl of Strafford, was condemned to death for treason. Fearing the King might try to use military force to rescue him, thousands of apprentices armed themselves, marched on Westminster, and effectively surrounded the Palace. During these tense days, a group of apprentices was seized and held prisoner inside the Mermaid Tavern. A furious mob stormed the tavern, overpowered the guards, and freed their comrades by force. The sheer, menacing size of the apprentice mob intimidated the House of Lords and forced King Charles I to sign Strafford's death warrant.
By late December, the chaos peaked. Tensions exploded when the King appointed a brutal, hated royalist soldier, Colonel Thomas Lunsford, to command the Tower of London. Massive crowds of poor apprentices and citizens marched down to Westminster to demand Lunsford’s dismissal and the removal of royalist bishops from Parliament.
Charles I’s authority was collapsing, Parliament was in open revolt and within a month Charles would flee London and never rule it in peace again.
Meanwhile, ordinary Londoners went about their business through all of it, buying bread, cheating each other, falling in love, half-noticing that the ground was opening under their feet.
That is the London of Clouded in Clerkenwell, where two face painters are so consumed by their own ambition that they barely register that the country falling apart around them.
It is a dark comedic novel of ambition, deception, and the particular mercy of a well-placed lie. It begins at the edge of the River Fleet, with a dead man's jewels going into the water.
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