John Souch, baptized on February 3, 1593of…

John Souch, baptized on February 3, 1593of 1594 at Ormskirk, Lancashire, had in 1607 been apprenticed (at the age of fourteen) for a term of ten years to Randle Holme, the Chester Herald Painter and antiquary.

A Herald Painter usually had a workshop in which all manner of heraldic devices and coats of arms were created for status conscious local gentry and nobility.

These would be painted on boards for display on special occasions.

A hatchment, a lozenge shaped board, would be carried at a funeral and then hung above the tomb.

However, the more talented herald painters sometimes branched out into portraiture, to satisfy a growing market for images to record betrothals, births, and (sometimes) deaths.

Souch, clearly gifted in this direction, had consequently prospered under Holme's tutelage.

He had become a Freeman of the City of Chester in 1616, when he was twenty three.

Painters in Chester, as elsewhere in England at this time, are regarded as craftsmen.

Consequently, Souch had become a member of the Chester Painters and Stationers Company, a painters' Guild that meets in the upper room of the Phoenix Tower on the city walls.

Although based in Chester, he has become, after the manner of the time, a peripatetic painter, traveling to client's houses within an area bounded by Shropshire to the South and Yorkshire to the North, and undertaking commissions, either heraldic or portraiture, on the spot.

Thus he had been paid thirty shillings in 1620 for a portrait of Francis Clifford, Fourth Earl of Cumberland (whereabouts unknown), executed at Skipton Castle.

(This is the first record of him as an independent artist.)

In common with many of his contemporaries, Souch has adopted a two dimensional style, in which linear form and decoration are to the fore, rather than modeling, depth, or perspective.

Although the portraiture of the time can be said to be iconic rather than realistic this approach is starting to change under the influence of Dutch and German painters active in London and elsewhere,.

Souch himself may have undertaken artistic training in the Netherlands at some stage in his career, and some art historians claim to have detected the influence of Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen.

In any case, his natural talent and sympathy for the subject seems to place him apart from other itinerant painters.

Nevertheless, after the arrival of Anthony Van Dyck in England, Souch clings to an older, Elizabethan, tradition of painting.

His masterpiece is undoubtedly Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of his Wife, a painting of Sir Thomas Aston, 1st Baronet and family attending his dying wife.

It has pride of place in one of the galleries of Manchester City Art Gallery.