This book looks at a range of Netherlandish artists, specialists in very different media, at work in England over a period of almost 250 years. It takes the examples of manuscript drawing (the anonymous, late fifteenth-century artist of ‘The pageants of Richard Beauchamp’, in the British Library), stained glass (the work of Galyon Hone from the mid-1520s to 1550), Sheldon tapestry production of the later sixteenth century, the workshop of the painter Lely from 1660 to 1680 and the engravings of Abraham Blooteling from 1673 to 1684. For the last of these case studies, a check-list of the engraver's work is assembled for the first time.

The author does not side-step certain issues of attribution and authorship common to traditional art-historical methods, but also explores the complex means by which production took place, thereby acknowledging the shift in recent scholarship towards the sense that we miss the point by focusing on an insistence on the ‘original’ when workshops were organized to cope with multiple demand, and also the significance of the passing of models and patterns via middlemen who worked as agents for patrons. This very awareness of such complexity, however, exposes a fundamental flaw in the concept of the book as a whole, for the case studies of work from such disparate traditions of production over so long a period are too brief and too isolated from each other to suggest a unified picture.

Assumptions are made about a ‘Netherlandish style’ that simply was not a common idea in the minds of so broad a swathe of patrons from ecclesiastical, courtly and mercantile communities. It implies also a rather rigid demarcation between the birth and training of a phalanx of Netherlandish artists in one place and then their importing of skills into England; it does not address issues of family members who accompanied them, of second-generation Netherlanders born in England, of artists who moved back and forth.

The situation was far more complex, as just a few examples would show: Paul van Somer worked in England for five years but his pre-London work is unrecorded; Cornelis Johnson was born in England but trained in Amsterdam; van Mireveldt built up a large English clientele amongst diplomats and their family connections without ever setting foot in England. The author claims the approach taken here has escaped the ‘grand narratives’ of ‘Gothic art’ or ‘Renaissance England’ in art history, but those narratives never existed in the work of the scholarly community, conscious as it was of religious and political upheavals accounting for unforeseen sharp turns of taste and disrupted supply.

The reader's doubts increase when different art-historical methods make a brief appearance and are then dropped; Bourdieu gets a mention and even Morellian analysis (his famous shapes of ears as a way of sorting different hands in the Beauchamp pageants), but only where they are temporarily useful. It is worrying to find ‘bi-cultural’, ‘bicultural’ and ‘bi cultural’; one searches for subtleties of difference that may or may not be implied by these different spellings. The use of sources, too, is inconsistent, treating older and newer authorities to the same extent and as if of the same value, without any sense of their having been in dialogue with each other. The book slips into error here and there, and half-truths that demonstrate a loose grip on very different specialisms. Who is the ‘cardinal’ whose agents were out and about in 1538 (pp 63–4)? Henry vii and Henry viii did not ‘finish a chain of royal residences … to establish a royal presence throughout the country’ (p 5); the concentration of a huge royal building programme in London and the south east led to the deliberate neglect of medieval royal buildings elsewhere in the country.

It is disappointing therefore not to be able to recommend a book that is admirably ambitious but demonstrates that this kind of parachuting into very different areas of scholarship will result in a misleading picture. Revealingly, the book has very little to say on the subject of techniques and materials. If art under the microscope has shown that Holbein's techniques, for example, were very common across a swathe of northern Europe, is it useful to polarize England and the Netherlands in this way rather than addressing the complex interactions of trade, migration and re-settlement that ignored political and religious divisions on the one hand but produced common means of achieving visual splendour on the other?