It ranks amongst the artist’s most flamboyant likenesses and relates loosely to a portrait miniature of the same sitter - widely regarded as the artist’s ‘miniature’ masterpiece [Fig. 1] - as well as several other portraits of the North family, which were all painted in 1627.[1]

Enclosed within a feigned marble oval, Lord North wears a distinctive striped and slashed silk doublet with a gorget of armour beneath his dropped lace ruff.[2] A proud knight of the Bath, he wears its badge prominently upon his chest; looped through a crimson ribbon, its newly donned motto, ‘TRIA IUNCTA IN UNO' ('Three Joined in One'), has been meticulously rendered by the artist.[3] Indeed, every texture and surface have been exquisitely realised, from the carefully articulated embroidery within the silk doublet to Sir Dudley’s softly falling hair, which is partially bound in a love knot.

From the late 1620s and through the 1630s, Johnson had a significant number of sitters from the principal gentry families of east Kent, including the barons North, and it was during this period that our portrait was painted.[4] Indeed, several portraits by Johnson of the North family formed part of their collection at Wroxton Abbey, including a portrait of our sitter’s father, Dudley, 3rd Lord North, which was also painted in 1627 [Fig. 2]. Around the same time that Johnson painted our sitter, he was also painted by the miniaturist John Hoskins (c.1590 – 1665), to very different effect. Hoskins worked in watercolour on vellum stuck on to card, which required a completely different technique from Johnson’s preferred medium of oil, whether on copper or panel, as seen here. It's apparent comparing his two portraits of Lord North that Johnson was able to render his subjects’ likenesses to equally brilliant effect, whatever the scale, as the art historian Charles H. Collins Baker observed, “The finish of his pieces in the late ‘twenties is high and smooth; in it we can without ingenuity be reminded of our theory that miniature-painting had played some part in his formation.”[5]

Dudley was the elder son of Dudley North, 3rd Baron North, and his wife Frances Brocket, daughter of Sir John Brocket of Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire. He was brought up ‘after the best manner’, and on 3 November 1616 was created a knight of the Bath in honour of Prince Charles’s creation as prince of Wales.[6] As a young man he was a self-styled, debonair wastrel; at Cambridge, where he matriculated at St. John’s College, he never took a degree, and later reflected in his autobiography that ‘in the prime of my youth I past (or rather lost) some few years at the University’. He was admitted to Gray's Inn in August 1619, but living with his parents at their London house, ‘and having no employment I surfeited of Idlenesse, taking my pastime with some of the most corrupt young men of those dayes’.[7]

In 1620, with the rank of lieutenant, Sir Dudley joined Sir Horace Vere’s expedition to recover the Palatinate. Upon returning home in 1622 he registered at the Inner Temple, but soon asked his father’s permission to return abroad, this time as a private traveler touring Italy, Spain, and France, the latter two during the wedding negotiations for Prince Charles. In 1624, returning to military service abroad, he was authorized by Henry Vere, earl of Oxford, to raise troops for the United Provinces. Now a captain, he commanded a ‘Foot Company in our Sovereigns Pay’ in the Netherlands.[8]

Our portrait was presumably painted by Johnson in anticipation of Dudley entering parliament as M.P. for Horsham, Sussex, in 1628. With his flowing hair and fashionable doublet, he is every inch the ‘courtier’, a young bachelor who moved as part of the court elite. It was somewhat later in 1634, that he made a prosperous match with Anne Montagu (c.1613 – 1681), second daughter and coheir of Sir Charles Montagu of Cranbrook (near Ilford, Essex) and his second wife, Mary, daughter of Sir William Whitmore of London. Dudley assured Anne that she could assume herself ‘to bee the person intended’ in his early love poems addressed to a mistress named Serena.[9] The couple went on to have fourteen children, ten of whom lived to adulthood, including six sons: Charles, (eventually 5th Baron North), Francis North (1637 – 1734), Dudley North (1641 – 1691), John North (1645 – 1683), Roger North (1651 – 1734), and Montagu, who became a Levant and London merchant.

Having first represented the borough of Horsham, Sir Dudley subsequently sat as member for Cambridgeshire in both the Short and the Long parliaments; he eventually described the latter as ‘that fatal Parliament which set the whole Kingdom on fire’.[10] Long a supporter of monarchy, he nevertheless chose to support parliament to secure the best interests of his family. In 1643, he was ordered to oversee the sequestering of delinquents’ property and was even put in charge of collecting money from the county of Cambridge for the purchase of pistols and armour for Cromwell’s regiment. He acted as a justice for Ely and Suffolk, concerning himself with local problems such as ‘tippling’ [drinking], gaming, and swearing, and for a time after 1653 he even performed civil marriages. In spite of the austerity of the Commonwealth, the Norths all the while retained the trappings of their courtly tastes, keeping a resident composer (notably, John Jenkins), and a considerable library.

On 5 June 1660, Sir Dudley petitioned the newly restored Charles II for a pardon, which was granted on 3 September. He reached his mid-sixties before his father died and he himself was summoned to the House of Lords in 1667. Having suffered much from the ‘stone’, North died on 24 June 1677 at Kirtling, and was buried privately on 27 June in the chancel of Kirtling church.

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Cornelius Johnson was the British-born son of Dutch émigrés in London, though his great-grandfather haled from Cologne. In 1622, when he married Elizabeth Beck (or Beek), herself from a Dutch migrant family based in Colchester, he was living in the London parish of St Ann, Blackfriars. Blackfriars was popular with immigrant craftsmen of many different trades, because it was outside the jurisdiction of the guilds of the City of London. Johnson would therefore have been part of a mutually supportive incomer community there. Throughout the 1620s, Johnson was clearly extremely busy, producing portraits for an increasingly important client base. He must have begun to run a workshop, with assistants, although we know nothing about how this operated.[11]

On 5 December 1632 Johnson was appointed Charles I’s ‘servant in ye quality of Picture Drawer’, and the king seems to predominantly used Johnson to make small-scale royal portraits, either on wooden panel or in his speciality medium, oil on copper, occasionally even including miniature copies after Van Dyck’s images. Indeed, earlier the same year, Anthony van Dyck had arrived in London and had begun to work for Charles I, who had knighted him on 5 July, and had appointed him ‘principalle Paynter in Ordinary to their Majesties’. As Charles’s official painter, van Dyck was, of course, expected to settle there. However socially and professionally ambitious Johnson may have been, the overwhelming success of Van Dyck must have presented him with a considerable challenge. Indeed, later in the 1630s, Johnson can sometimes be seen discreetly adopting and adapting van Dyckian compositions and postures in his own work.

Van Dyck died in December 1641, which should have re-opened opportunities for the artists in London whom he had elbowed aside. However, the political situation was deteriorating, and the King and Court left London early in 1642. In October 1643 Johnson and his family emigrated to the northern Netherlands, where his career had a second blossoming, as a leading portrait painter until his death in Utrecht in 1661. Twelve people carried his coffin, indicating his final wealth and status.

[1] Formerly with The Weiss Gallery, now on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

[2] The feigned marble cartouche was Johnson’s preferred choice of setting at that time, as though placing his sitters quite literally in stone for posterity. Johnson, along with the English artist William Larkin, was one of the earliest proponents of this format.

[3] It is generally thought that this refers to the newly united kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

[4] George Vertue recorded that Johnson lived for a time in Bridge, near Canterbury – ‘[Johnson] lived sometime in Kent…[and] painted pictures fore several Gent. Familyes thereabouts….done mostly in the years 1630 & to 40.’ See K. Hearn, “The National & Professional Identities of Cornelius Johnson” from Cornelius Johnson: Painter to King and Country’, The Weiss Gallery, London 2016, p. 13.

[5] C.H. Collins Baker, Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters, Vol. 1, London 1912, p. 81.

[6] D. North, Lives, 1.6. See: Dale B. J. Randall, Dictionary of National Biography, online.

[7] D. North, Observations, sig. A3v–A4r. See: Dictionary of National Biography, online, ibid.

[8] D. North, Observations, sig. A4. See: Dictionary of National Biography, online, ibid.

[9] Randall, 128. See: Dictionary of National Biography, online, ibid.

[10] D. North, Observations, sig. A4v. See: Dictionary of National Biography, online, ibid.

[11] In January 1625, Johnson took on John Evoms.as an apprentice, and in April 1638 another (unnamed) apprentice joined him. According to George Vertue, Johnson’s nephew Theodore Roussel worked with him for nine years; see Hearn 2015, op. cit., pp. 17, 18, 45.