Justus Suttermans (1597–1681)

• Was a Flemish painter and draughtsman who is mainly known for his portraits.
• He also painted history and genre paintings, still lifes and animals.

• Sustermans is chiefly noted for his portraits of members of the Medici family as he was its court painter.

• Justus Sustermans was born in Antwerp as the son of the tailor Frans Suttermans or Sustermans, and Esther Scheepmans.

• He was in 1609 registered as a pupil of Willem de Vos (a nephew of the painter Maerten de Vos) at the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke.
• He left Antwerp for Paris in 1616, where he spent about two years in the workshop of Frans Pourbus the Younger.
• When Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany invited in 1620 a team of Flemish and French tapestry weavers from Paris to Tuscany, Suttermans joined them.
• On 20 April 1621 he is first documented in Florence when the Compagnia dei SS Barbara e Quirino paid him for a painting of Saint Barbara.
• He is first recorded in the service of the Medici in October 1621.
• As the Medici had many family connections with other courts in northern Italy and Austria, Sustermans often travelled to other cities in Italy as well as to Vienna.
• In 1620 to early 1621 he was active in Mantua.
• He traveled to Rome with his brother Frans, where in 1627 he painted portraits of Pope Urban VIII and most of the cardinals at the Vatican.
• He became friends with Rubens and van Dyck and maintained regular correspondence with them.
• He commissioned from Rubens in 1638 the painting Horrors of War for his own collection.
• He operated a large workshop which produced many copies and variations of his paintings.
• Some of the collaborators in his workshop established a name for themselves including the brothers Valore and Domenico Casini, Valerio Marucelli, Francesco Bianchi Buonavita and Giovanni Lionardo Henner.
• He died in Florence on 23 April 1681.
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