Gerard Johnson the elder

Gerard Johnson the elder (d. 1611) is the Anglicised form of Gheerart Janssen, a Dutch sculptor who operated a monument workshop in Elizabethan and Jacobean England and the father of Gerard Johnson the younger, who is thought to have created Shakespeare's funerary monument. He and Cornelius Cure became the leaders of the so-called Southwark school of monument design, which dominated the English market in the late-sixteenth century.

Johnson was born in Amsterdam and emigrated to England from the Gelderland province around 1567, probably as a Protestant refugee. He became an English citizen in 1568 and Anglicized his name. Forbidden as an alien to live in the City of London, he settled across the Thames River in Southwark in the Bankside area, in which communities of Dutch and Flemish refugees flourished. Johnson married an English woman, Mary (or Marie), and had a family of five sons and a daughter. Two of the sons, Nicholas and Gerard, became sculptors and continued their father's monument business.

Johnson's workshop became a major monument supplier. In 1593 his workshop employed four journeymen and an apprentice, as well as an English assistant.

He died in 1611 and was buried on 30 July at St Saviour's, Southwark. Although it is known that he made some garden sculptor and a chimney piece, none of which survives, in his will he described himself as a "tombemaker".

Johnson's clientele included several important patrons, such as the earls of Rutland, the earls of Southampton, and the Gage family of East Sussex in 1595.

...
Wikipedia