Biography

The Flemish artist Jacob Huysmans trained in Antwerp under Frans Wouters. He arrived in England around the time of Charles II’s Restoration in 1660. He was attached to the court of the queen, Catherine of Braganza, a fellow-Catholic, and he called himself ‘Her Majesty’s Painter’. When the diarist Samuel Pepys visited Huysmans’s studio in 1664 he saw two portraits of the queen, as a shepherdess and as St Catherine of Alexandria, which he said were painted “‘most like and most admirably”. Many important patrons sat to Huysmans, and he was a serious rival to the king’s official painter, Sir Peter Lely.