John Souch (1593/4 – 1645) was an English portrait painter. He flourished in the early seventeenth century in the North West of England, and perhaps epitomises the role of art in English local life at that time. Early life John Souch was baptised on 3 February 1593/4 at Ormskirk, Lancashire In 1607, he was apprenticed (at the age of fourteen) for a term of ten years to Randle Holme I, the Chester Herald painter and antiquary. In 1600 and again in 1606 Holme had been appointed a deputy herald of the College of Arms in Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales. A Herald Painter usually had a workshop in which all manner of heraldic devices and coats of arms were created for status conscious local gentry and nobility. These would be painted on boards for display on special occasions. A hatchment, a lozenge shaped board, would be carried at a funeral and then hung above the tomb. However, the more talented herald painters sometimes branched out into portraiture, to satisfy a growing market for images to record betrothals, births, and (sometimes) deaths. Souch was clearly gifted in this direction, and consequently prospered under Holme's tutelage. He became a Freeman of the City of Chester in 1616, when he was twenty three. Painters in Chester, as elsewhere in England at the time, were regarded as craftsmen. Consequently, he became a member of the Chester Painters and Stationers Company, a painters' Guild that met in the upper room of the Phoenix Tower or King Charles Tower on the city walls. Although based in Chester, he became, after the manner of the time, a peripatetic painter, travelling to client's houses within an area bounded by Shropshire to the South and Yorkshire to the North, and undertaking commissions, either heraldic or portraiture, on the spot. The first record of him working as an artist was in 1620, when he was paid 30 shillings, probably for a portrait of Francis Clifford, 4th Earl of Cumberland for painting his portrait at Skipton Castle. This portrait might be the same as the portrait of Francis Clifton, now at Hardwick Hall. Style of painting In common with many of his contemporaries, Souch adopted a two dimensional style, in which linear form and decoration were to the fore, rather than modelling, depth, or perspective. In fact the portraiture of the time can be said to be iconic rather than realistic.