Steven van der Meulen

Steven van der Meulen was born in Antwerp, in present-day Belgium. His birth year is not securely documented. Art-market reference sites have circulated conflicting dates, including 1493 and 1543, but neither is confirmed by more careful modern scholarship, so it is left open here. He trained as a pupil of the Antwerp painter Willem van Cleve the Younger from 1543, and was admitted to the Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1552.

By around 1560 he had traveled to London, where he worked among the group of Flemish artists active at the court of the young Elizabeth I. He died soon after, and was buried at the church of St Andrew Undershaft in London on 24 October 1563. He should not be confused with a different, much later Belgian artist of the same name, active 1841 to 1905, who appears on some art-market sites and is an unrelated figure.

Modern scholarship on van der Meulen centers less on stylistic praise than on attribution. He was long credited with several of the earliest and most important painted portraits of Elizabeth I, works that helped shape the visual template for royal portraiture. Archival research published by curator Edward Town in 2020 reassigned the so called Hampden portrait of Elizabeth I, and several other works once credited to van der Meulen, to the painter George Gower, Elizabeth I's Serjeant Painter. The effect is a body of work that is smaller and less securely defined than it once appeared, with his name now most confidently attached to a small number of works, such as the portraits of Sir William Petre and a member of the Tichborne family held at New College, University of Oxford.

Van der Meulen's auction market is that of a rare, thinly traded Old Master. His record sale is a full-length portrait of Elizabeth I, sold as a work by van der Meulen at Sotheby's London in November 2007 for approximately GBP 2.6 million, roughly USD 5.3 million at the time. No later sale exceeding this price appears in public auction records as of this writing. Because so few paintings are securely attributed to him, most works that do reach auction are catalogued cautiously, as "attributed to," "circle of," or "workshop of" Steven van der Meulen, rather than as certain autograph works.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Steven van der Meulen, and given the pace of ongoing archival research, attribution to him should be treated as provisional rather than fixed. Any work offered as "by," "attributed to," or "circle of" van der Meulen carries a materially different level of certainty, and the recent reattribution of major Elizabeth I portraits to George Gower shows how quickly that status can change. Supply at auction is extremely limited, so the 2007 Sotheby's sale remains the only clearly documented benchmark, and collectors should weigh current institutional scholarship, rather than older museum labels, when assessing any purported work by this artist.