BETTES, John, I

English painter and wood-engraver. His signed Portrait of a Man in a Black Cap (1545; London, Tate) is painted in the tradition of Hans Holbein the Younger and is a major factor in the unresolved debate about what studio, assistants or pupils Holbein had in England. A label on the back, cut from the portrait or from its original frame, reads faict par Johan Bettes Anglois, the ‘Anglois’ probably indicating that it was painted abroad. Three other portraits survive that might be by the same hand, the most likely on stylistic grounds being Sir William Cavendish (Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire) and Thomas Wentworth, 1st Baron Wentworth of Nettlestead (London, National Portrait Gallery).

In 1546-47 Bettes put in a claim for services to Catherine Parr - for limning representations of Henry VIII and the Queen ‘engraved in stone’ by an unidentified Giles, and for six other ‘pyctures’. His small fees of fifteen shillings and five shillings indicate that the works were probably miniatures. He engraved a title-page and figured initials for Edward Halle’s Chronicle (1548 and 1550), and he was probably the monogrammist ‘I. B.’ who designed and cut a title-page first used in William Cunningham’s Cosmographical Glasse in 1559. Bettes has been identified as the ‘skilful Briton’ who designed a fine woodcut (for which the block was cut at Wittenberg) of Franz Burchard, Chancellor to the Elector of Saxony, who was in London in 1559 to seek for his master the hand of Elizabeth I in marriage. The artist was perhaps the ‘Johannes Bett’ buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on 24 June 1570.

His son, John Bettes II was also painter.