Rowland Lockey

Lockey was apprenticed to Queen Elizabeth's miniaturist and goldsmith Nicholas Hilliard for eight years beginning Michaelmas 1581 and was made a freeman or master of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths by 1600. He worked mainly as a copyist of earlier portraits to make up sets of oil paintings for the fashionable long galleries of great houses, but signed or documented portrait miniatures on vellum and a signed title page engraving for the 1602 Bishops' Bible also survive.

Training under Nicholas Hilliard is recorded. The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are London. Work by Rowland Lockey is recorded in the collections of Nationalmuseum, National Gallery of Victoria, National Portrait Gallery, Hardwick Hall and Government Art Collection.

• Illustration — Sir Thomas More, his father, his household and his descendants, oil on canvas, c. 1593 • Illustration — Sir Thomas More and Descendants, miniature, vellum stuck to card, c. 1594 He is best known for his two near life-size copies from the early 1590s of The Family of Sir Thomas More (1527) by Hans Holbein the Younger. The original is now lost–it was destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century. Lockey's versions, which are at Nostell Priory and the National Portrait Gallery in London, differ considerably, as the London version, Sir Thomas More, his father, his household and his descendants, includes More's descendants in their contemporary dress but omits several of the figures in the Holbein original. This was painted around 1593, probably commissioned by More's grandson, Thomas More II, to commemorate five generations of the family. The four figures wearing ruffs and holding prayer books on the right are Thomas More II, his wife and their oldest and youngest sons. Anne More, née Cresacre (1511–77), was Sir Thomas's daughter-in-law, and appears twice: once copied from the Holbein as a young woman of about sixteen (between Sir Thomas and his father) and also as an older woman in the painting on the rear wall. A cabinet miniature version of this portrait c. 1594 with different details, also likely by Lockey, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. There is also a surviving drawing by Holbein which confirms the general accuracy of the Nostell Priory version. • Illustration — Study by Hans Holbein the Younger for the now lost group portrait of the Sir Thomas More family Two further copies of the Holbein, at old Chelsea Town Hall and Hendred House, East Hendred, may be by Lockey, but are too damaged and over-painted for any certainty to be possible.

Lockey can be associated with Dutch or Flemish painters residing in London in the 1580s. One such painter, Peter Matheeusen in his 1588 will made bequests to his cousin Adrian Vanson, to the miniaturist Isaac Oliver and to Rowland Lockey, including his library of manuals for painters.