- Edward Chaney
Extract
(b Middelburg, Zeeland, Feb 23, 1592; d Hampstead Marshall, Berks, 1663).
Dutch courtier, miniature painter, architect, and writer, of French origin, active in England. The son of a Huguenot émigré, and perhaps a pupil of the artist Hendrick Goltzius, he travelled to London in 1616. William Sanderson, in his Graphice of 1658, says that Gerbier ‘had little of art, or merit; a common Pen-man who pensil’d the Dialogue [Decalogue] in the Dutch Church, London; his first rise of preferment’ (p. 15). Two or three years later he entered the service of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, whose miniature portrait he painted in 1618 (London, Syon House), the same year in which he wrote a poem on the death of Goltzius, which features his future friend Rubens. Rubens was to paint a portrait of his wife Debora Kip (daughter of the Dutch-born goldsmith and engraver William Kip), whom Gerbier married not later than 1618 (Huguenot Soc. Proc., 3rd ser., x, p. 194). Gerbier was clearly instrumental in the spectacularly rapid growth of Buckingham’s collection of pictures. In ...
