Robert Streater

Robert Streater (1621–1679) (also known as Streeter), was an English landscape, history, still-life and portrait artist, architectural painter, and etcher. He was Serjeant Painter to King Charles II, and decorated the ceiling of Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.

Streater was born in Covent Garden, London, and is said to have been the son of a painter, and to have received his instruction in painting and drawing from an artist called Du Moulin. He was very industrious, and attained considerable ability in his art, which was highly praised by his contemporaries. His style was founded on that of the Baroque Italian painters. He excelled in architectural and decorative paintings on a large scale, especially those in which perspective and a knowledge of foreshortening were required. He painted landscapes, especially topographical, with skill, and also still life.Sir William Sanderson, in his Graphice (1658), spoke of "Streter, who indeed is a compleat Master therein, as also in other Arts of Etching, Graving, and his works of Architecture and Perspective, not a line but is true to the Rules of Art and Symmetry".

In 1664 both Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn mentioned, and the latter described, "Mr. Thomas Povey's elegant house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where the perspective in his court, painted by Streeter, is indeede excellent, with the vases in imitation of porphyrie and fountains". Pepys, in 1669, wrote that he "went to Mr. Streater, the famous history-painter, where I found Dr. Wren and other virtuosos looking upon the paintings he is making of the new theatre at Oxford", and described Streater as "a very civil little man and lame, but lives very handsomely".

Evelyn, in 1672, notes at Sir Robert Clayton's house, "the cedar dining-room painted with the history of the Gyants War, incomparably done by Mr. Streeter, but the figures are too near the eye" (the paintings were afterwards removed to Marden, near Godstone). Again in 1679 Evelyn noted that some of Streater's best paintings were at Mr. Boone's (or Bohun's) house, Lee Place, Blackheath. Streater's paintings in the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford were eulogised by poetaster, Robert Whitehall (1625–85) in his poem 'Urania':

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