ABSTRACT
S ir balthazar gerbier was born in Middelburg in Holland on 23 February 1592. His father was a Huguenot émigré by the name of Anthony and Gerbier was to claim that his great-grandfather was ‘Anthony Gerbier, Baron Douvilly’, a title he used himself on at least one occasion. He may have been a pupil of Hendrik Goltzius (of whom he published a verse eulogy in 1620), but seems to have come to the attention of Prince Maurice thanks to his knowledge of the ‘framing of warlike machines’. Gerbier's elaborate pen and ink equestrian portrait of the prince, dated 1616, is in the British Museum, as is his later drawing of Frederick of Bohemia. On Maurice's recommendation, Gerbier accompanied the Dutch Ambassador, Noël de Caron, to London in 1616 and in the same year he painted the heir to the throne, Prince Charles. In his Graphice (1658, p. 15), William Sanderson says that Gerbier ‘had little of Art, or merit; a common Pen-man, who Pensil'd the Decalogue in the Dutch Church LONDON; his first rise of preferment’.
