was baptised on 30 September 1623 at St Anne's Church. Another son Cornelius Johnson, junior who also became a painter, was baptised on 15 August 1634. Johnson wished to be regarded as an English gentleman, registering his pedigree with the College of Arms. His arms were three gold parrots on a gold background, and had a crest of a silver Catherine wheel with two parrot wings behind it. Apparently winged crests are common in German heraldry which may show the arms previously used by the family. Johnson moved to Canterbury in the mid-1630s, living with Sir Arnold Braems, a Flemish merchant, and continued to live in England until after the outbreak of the English Civil War, but in October 1643, apparently at the insistence of his wife, he moved to Middelburg, joining the Guild of St. Luke there. He was given parliamentary permission to travel " ... and to cary with him such pictures and colours, bedding, household stuff, pewter, and brass as belongs to himself". Between 1646 and 1652 he lived in Amsterdam, before settling in Utrecht, where he was buried. Portraiture Johnson' first dated work is 1617, and may be of a Dutch subject; 1619 marks the beginning of his English portraits, which were initially heads only, although he later painted full-length and group portraits. For painting a portrait, Johnson liked to charge £5 compared with a more typical figure of 10s – 20s. However, this was not as expensive as better known artists such as Van Dyck or Peter Lely. Karen Hearn's ODNB entry for Johnson notes that "in 1638 Sir Thomas Pelham of Halland House, Sussex, paid £4 for his portrait by Johnson" (referencing an account book among the Pelham family papers, BL, Add. MS 33145, fol. 107). There are hundreds of portraits of the emerging new gentry by Johnson, including Lady Rose MacDonnell of Antrim. "Johnson's art was best suited to the relative intimacy of the bust length portrait in which, with a certain detachment, he captured the reticence of the English landed gentry and minor aristocracy". One of his earliest surviving portraits is of Susanna Temple, grandmother of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Tate). This portrait was subsequently engraved by Robert White towards the end of the seventeenth century. A copy of the engraving was among the prints owned by Samuel Pepys which subsequently passed to Magdalene College, Cambridge. His royal portraits include Charles I