Cornelius Jonson van Ceulen

Karen Hearn traces the Dutch roots of this ‘Zeeland’ master of international renown.

Portraitist of the great ones of the earth
Cornelius Jonson (1593–1661) was born in London into a Flemish-German migrant family and grew there into a productive and successful portrait painter. He portrayed merchants, lawyers, and (landed) nobility, as well as compatriots who lived in London. He depicted the details of the luxurious clothing and lace of his sitters.

In 1632 Jonson was appointed ‘Picture-Drawer’ to King Charles I, for whom he made small-scale images of members of the royal family. In 1643, after the outbreak of the civil war in Great Britain, Jonson migrated with his family to the Northern Netherlands, where he initially stayed in Middelburg. Later he worked in Amsterdam, The Hague, and again in Middelburg, before finally settling in Utrecht in 1652. From 1649 he adopted the name ‘Cornelius Jonson van Ceulen.’ Among his Dutch sitters was William III of Orange-Nassau as a child. Jonson worked on every scale, from small portrait miniatures to large civic group portraits, and throughout his career demonstrated remarkable flexibility and resilience