Inigo Jones (1573–1652) was the first British designer who fully merited the description of architect. He was particularly influenced by the work of Andrea Palladio, whose work he studied during an Italian tour made in 1613–1614. He acquired a large collection of Palladio’s drawings that strongly influenced his designs and formed the basis of the later Palladian Revival in England. As Surveyor of the King’s Works from 1615, he was responsible for maintenance and new buildings required by the courts of James I and Charles I. Little of his work survives apart from the Queen’s House, Greenwich (1616–1635) and the Banqueting House, Whitehall (1619–1622). This painting is an early eighteenth-century copy of van Dyck's famous portrait of Jones now in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and its date is confirmed by recent conservation (2006).