CIRCLE OF HIERONIMOS CUSTODIS (?ANTWERP-C. 1593 LONDON)

Sir Francis Hynde of Madingley Hall, Cambridgeshire, who was a page to King Edward VI, first sat as MP for the county in 1559 and was three times elected High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. He married Jane, daughter of Sir Ralph Verney of Pendley Manor, Buckinghamshire. Sir Francis built on to Madingley Hall, adding a first-floor long gallery eighty-seven feet in length, in which a pair of portraits of Sir Francis and his wife hang. These portraits, dated 1591, on which the present portrait is based, are the work of the artist Hieronimo Custodis (d.c.1593), one of many Flemish artists of the Tudor court who had fled to England.

A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE:

Sir Roy Strong, C.H., F.R.S.L. (b. 1935) is an English art historian, former museum curator, writer, broadcaster, and garden designer. He was made Director of the National Portrait Gallery aged 32, and at 38 Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, where he stayed until 1987. Sir Roy has published extensively, and is particularly renowned for his knowledge of Elizabethan portraiture, and gardens. In 1971 he married the theatre-designer Julia Trevelyan Oman (1930-2003), and together they created the celebrated gardens at The Laskett, Much Birch, Herefordshire, which Sir Roy has recently gifted to Perennial, the Gardeners' Royal Benevolent Society.