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°
