ABSTRACT
A great deal has now been done to place the production and possession of post-Reformation English portraiture in its appropriate social context. Given the opportunity for research, curators and art historians once preoccupied almost exclusively with the style and aesthetic quality of the painted image now regularly frequent the archives office, where they investigate the identity and intentions of the patrons, painters, and sitters. Parish registers, wills, and post mortem inventories in particular have become nearly as familiar to some curators as to the social historian. Correspondence, apprenticeship enrolments, guild records, theoretical writings, accounts books, and the whole range of primary biographical sources now also come frequently into play.
