The Stanger Painters
Daniël Mijtens, Charles I (1600–1649), King of England, 1629. Oil on canvas, 200.3 x 140.7 cm., Metropolitan Museum of Art, Object Number: 06.1289.
Here is a reality at the heart of my novel, and it is entirely historical.
In the London of 1641, if you were an English painter, the most lucrative work in the country — the court, the King, the great portrait commissions — was effectively closed to you. Not because you lacked talent, but because Charles I and his circle preferred the continental masters: the Dutch, the Flemish, the Italians, trained in the great academies, who had studied anatomy from real corpses and drawing from the life in ways no English guild training could match. These incomers were known as stranger painters — "stranger" being the period's word for a foreigner — and they took the commissions worth having.
The English painters resented it bitterly, and they had a guild, the Painter-Stainers' Company, to protect their interests. But here the unfairness doubled back on itself in a way I find fascinating. The stranger painters, for all their prestige, were also hemmed in: they could not open a studio within the city walls, and could not take on English apprentices. The Englishman couldn't reach the court; the foreigner couldn't fully establish himself. Each was locked out of something the other had.
This is the exact bind my two painters are caught in — and, crucially, it's the thing that binds them to each other. Antonis is a gifted stranger painter with no legal standing. Henry is an English apprentice with the birthright his colleague lacks, but not the freedom to use his own gift. As Antonis puts it, with characteristic tactlessness: you have something you don't even want, while I have needed it ever since I moved here.
The truth, of course, was likely more nuanced than simple hostility — and that grey space, where resentment and dependence tangle together, is exactly where my novel lives. A real resolution to the stranger painters' plight wouldn't arrive until the eighteenth century, with the founding of an English academy of art. Henry, you might say, was born a little too early.
The question this raises
Neither man made the rules. The system that traps them is arbitrary, inherited, and indifferent to talent — and there are two ways to respond to a rigged game. You can rage at its injustice, which is satisfying and changes nothing. Or you can find the one narrow crack in the wall that happens to be shaped like you, and squeeze through it — which is how most people actually survive an unfair world, and which asks you to become quietly complicit in the very system you resent. My characters choose the crack. Most of us do. I'm not sure we're wrong to. I'm not sure we're right, either.
The part that fascinates me
This is one of the details that made me want to write this particular period, because the unfairness is so specifically shaped — not a vague "life was hard," but a precise, documented bind that pits talent against birthright against nationality, and locks two kinds of painter out of two different things. As an art historian, I could have written a very dry chapter about guild regulations and the Statute of Artificers. As a novelist, I got to do something far more enjoyable: give the whole tangled injustice to two men who need each other precisely because they're locked out of opposite things, and let them argue about it while grinding pigment. The history became a friendship. That's the trade I never get tired of making.
Zoomable Map of Stranger Painter’s Studios in 1641, London
Click the image to zoom: https://srv2.zoomable.ca/viewer.php?i=img07ecec7988b0108a_Artist_Studio_Map#zoom=1.07289&x=0.50000&y=0.28358
Key to the map
1. Cornelius de Droocht’s Studio, 9 St John’s Square, Clerkenwell
2. The De Critz Family, St Andrew’s, Holborn
3. Cornelius Johnson, St Ann, Blackfriars
4. Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Blackfriars
5. Laurence Hilliard, St Bride, Fleet Street
6. Miniaturists’ quarter, St Ann, Blackfriars
7. Robert Streeter, St Giles, Cripplegate
8. St Paul’s Cathedral
9. Painter-Stainers’ Hall
10. London Bridge and the Way to Southwark
11. The Way to Whitehall Palace
