ABSTRACT
The personal details of John Lowin's life are as reticent as his expression. The date in the painting ties in with a christening at St Giles Cripplegate, on 9th December 1576, of John, son of Richard Lowin, a currier, or leather dresser. The family appears to have come to London from Hertford and the Enfield area of Middlesex, where there are records of many John Lowins, the surname variously spelt, and of a Rychard Lowin christened at Enfield in 1550, a date which fits in with his parentage of John. The ward of Cripplegate straddled the city boundary and the church of St Giles Without, as its name indicates, was outside the city walls, accessed via Fore Street. The church had been badly damaged in a fire in 1545 and largely rebuilt. John Stow describes the parish as home to 1,800 householders and more than 4,000 communicants. White Cross and Red Cross Streets were in this area, together with Golding Lane, in which there were tenements and almshouses for the poor, though Stow also notes streets with "beautifull houses of stone, brick & timber'. 1 Two notable buildings were Garter House and Drury House, and water was supplied in 'Conduit brought in pypes of leade from Highbery' (Stow. I, p. 300). Two years before Lowin's birth, James Burbage and his sons undertook the financial gamble of building a theatre in Shoreditch, also north of the city, which opened to the public in 1576. The following year it was joined by the nearby Curtain theatre and by one in Newington Butts, south of the river.
