Preface

Summary

This study has followed a long and winding path which began many years ago with work on the conventional political history of early modern England. Guided by the allure of human activity at the ground level of the local community, that route has meandered through groves of political and then social history, and made long detours into the realms of vernacular building and both civic and material culture. More recently it has entailed extended and enlightening sojourns amongst art historical and curatorial communities at the National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere. It has always entailed frequent fuelling stops in the repositories of local and provincial as well as national and metropolitan archives, taking on information, ideas, and inspiration along the way. But it rarely departed for long from that different country of the past which begins with the accession of the Tudors and comes to a climactic end with the downfall of Charles I.

This latest report of the journey's progress follows on the heels of three earlier monographs which have attempted to link the realms of local and social history on the one hand with those of visual and material culture on the other: an investigation of architecture and political power in urban communities (1995), a study of civic portraiture in those same sorts of communities (2007), and a work on the emergence of a public for portraiture in provincial England (2012).

From the very outset of these meanderings, and especially while working on the role of town halls in the urban communities of early modern England, I began to notice that many such buildings displayed portraits of their founders or local worthies. Most were anonymously and not very well painted: their crude, craft-like quality itself caught my eye. On trying to ascertain who painted them I more often than not came up blank. Those names which did surface in the archives usually disappeared when I searched for them in published scholarship. Yet these painters had obviously gained local importance in the towns and parishes which engaged their services. They had contributed to the material fabric and cultural heritage of their communities.