Artist

(b. ca. 1576, Antwerpen, d. 1621, London)

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Details

Flemish painter. who settled in London in 1616. He was, with Mijtens and Jonson, one of the best portrait painters in England before the arrival of van Dyck. He received his initial training in Antwerp. He was perhaps a pupil of the obscure Flemish painter Philip Lisaert (fl 1530-1588), the master of Paul's elder brother Bernaert van Somer (c. 1575-1612), as the subject-matter of the two brothers has strong similarities. Bernaert was active as a painter, printmaker and art dealer. Van Mander noted van Somer's presence in Amsterdam in 1604 and described him as a good painter. He travelled extensively during the following decade and is recorded in Leiden in 1612-14, The Hague in 1615 and in Brussels in 1616. At this time he was employed by the Brabant Chambre des Comptes to paint portraits of the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella, and it is asserted that he visited London, though he cannot be traced there definitely before 1616. Van Somer arrived in England at a time when Henry, Prince of Wales, the most important patron of the visual arts in early 17th-century England, and his mother, Anne of Denmark, wife of James I and VI, were bringing about a revolution in artistic taste. Anne at once became van Somer's most important patron. Such immediate acceptance of a foreign artist suggests that the refined, hieratic, neo-Gothic world of Elizabethan painting was already in decline, perhaps hastened by the death of several prominent painters, notably Nicholas Hilliard. Somer's earliest datable work, Queen Anne of Denmark (1617), is perhaps the best. However, van Somer's work is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary development from the former style. Many elements of his compositions find parallels in the work of such painters as Robert Peake and Marcus Gheeraerts II, though van Somer's painting technique is rather closer to early 17th-century Antwerp painting. The importance of Somer's painting lies in its being a watershed between the opposing aesthetics of Elizabethan Gothic Survival and the continental Baroque of Anthony van Dyck. After van Somer's death, his wife continued to receive substantial payments from the court for his paintings. //

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Category	Artists
Artists by letter	S
Artist nationality	Flemish