r 



MEDIAEVAL PAINTING 



payment of a sum of iooj/ From these accounts yet another painter's name 

 and mention of his work, may be recovered. Under date 1420—21 Edmund 

 Bradwelle was paid loj. for painting the panels of the pulpitum or quire screen, 

 and at some later date he is said to have received £,1^ 6s. bJ. for decorating 

 the roof of the church.^ 



Possibly further search in Norfolk wills, or in documents preserved in 

 the municipal archives of Lynn or Yarmouth, would reveal the traces of other 

 painters, but from the lists here furnished a conclusion may be drawn that in 

 Norfolk through the middle ages a class of native artists did exist, and that 

 to them is due the painted work yet to be seen on wall, or roof, or screen, in 

 the various churches of the county. 



Foreign influence is said to be visible in the screen and other paintings. 

 If so, it must have been an influence from the Low Countries. Of Italian 

 influence there is not a shadow. But whatever there may have been of any 

 foreign element, there is little that can be clearly traced. In the lists given 

 only one foreign name appears, viz., Giles le Fleming of Bruges, and that at a 

 date (1285—98) when painting on the screens had as yet no existence. All 

 the other names are distinctly English, many of them being derived from 

 those of villages in the county or in the next one, as Frenze, Bradwell, Castle- 

 acre, Acle (Ocle), Hickling, etc. If the view be accepted, and it is difficult 

 to see why it should not be, that the art of painting in Norfolk throughout 

 the middle ages was practised by natives of that county, with very little of 

 influence from abroad, we have a development of that art which, although 

 it cannot be compared in artistic value with the corresponding art of Flanders 

 or of Italy, should have for us a real and abiding interest. 



The great political and religious changes of the sixteenth century put a 

 stop to any further progress in the art of painting here as elsewhere through- 

 out England, so far as it served the Church, but in the later screens in Norfolk, 

 tlie portraits of donors showed the line in which it was possible for it to 

 continue, and in the direction of portrait painting it probably went on at least 

 into the seventeenth century, if not later. Two undoubted contemporary 

 portraits of citizens of Norwich, one of John Marsham, Mayor of that city 

 in 1518, and the other of Robert Jannys, Mayor in 15 17 and again in 1524, 

 are examples of the beginning of the change in the native art when it was 

 ceasing to be occupied with the illustration of religious subjects. Both por- 

 traits, with many later ones of prominent citizens of Norwich, are hung in 

 the Council Chamber of the Guildhall of that city. That of Jannys, if it 

 were not for its size, might almost have been taken from a screen panel. 

 Unlike the paintings at Sparham previously described, it really does represent 

 an episode in the subject of the Dance of Death so much in vogue in the 

 early part of the sixteenth century. The grisly phantom, holding a silver 

 mace in one hand, grasps with the other the right arm of the worthy mayor 

 (who is depicted in his robes of office), as if to drag him reluctantly away, 

 while the first line of an inscription in black letter on a label at the base of 

 the picture declares : 



' ffior (despite) all welth, worship, and prosperite 

 fierce death ys ctim and restyd me.' 



1 ' Extracts from Ancient Accounts of Mcttingham College, Suffolk,' Arch. Journ. (1849), vi. 64. 

 * Ibid. vi. 67. 



2 553 7° 



