Lot 215: Nicholas Lockey (fl.1600-1624)

Portrait of John King (1559-1621), half-length, holding a prayer book in his right hand, feigned oval dated 'A 1620' (upper left) oil on panel 31 x 241/2 in. (78.8 x 62.3 cm.) PROVENANCE Probably Major J.M.W. Gill of Taunton, by 1935. Anon. sale; Sotheby's, 15 June 1955, lot 73 (incorrectly identified as Henry King, Bishop of Chichester). ENGRAVED Simon de Passe. LITERATURE J. Ingamells, Episcopal Portraits, Guildford, 1981, p.258, no.B6. R. Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, London, 1969, p.185. NOTES John King was the son of Philip King of Worming Hall, Buckinghamshire. He was educated at Westminster and Oxford, taking Holy Orders in 1590. Rising to become Bishop of London in 1611, he was quick to make use of his talents as a preacher and public speaker. A mural tablet near his grave in St. Paul's Cathedral remembers him as a solid and profound divine, of great gravity and piety and as having 'so excellent a volubility of speech, that Sir Edmund Coke would often say of him that he was the best speaker in the Star-Chamber in his time'.