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Description: | After serving an apprenticeship with a member of London's Drapers' Company, Thomas Cullum (1587-1664), the sitter of this portrait, established himself as a highly successful woollen draper in the capital. Financial gain was accompanied by civic advancement. During the 1640s Cullum served as a common councillor, then alderman of London. This portrait shows him in the civic robes of a Sheriff of the City, an office he held in 1646-47. However, shortly after this portrait was made Cullum spent six months in the Tower for allegedly lending money to the royalist cause. Nevertheless, for the most part, Cullum negotiated the political situation of the interregnum and Restoration with considerable acumen, allowing his business to flourish under both regimes. In 1656 he purchased the Suffolk estates of Hardwick and Hawstead. Following the Restoration four years later, he was made a baronet, thus completing his rise from the ranks of the artisan class to those of the landed, titled elite. This is the earliest of several family portraits bequeathed to the borough of St Edmundsbury by the last surviving member of the Cullum family, George Gery Milner-Gibson Cullum, on his death in 1921. | Subjects: | Sir Thomas portrait (Cullum 1st Bt) | Source: | Vads | Creator: | Artist: Soest, Gerard (Dutch painter in England, ca.1600-1681) Æ Attributed to | Identifier: | http://www.vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=8618... | Go to resource |
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