Peter Vanderbank
French-English engraver (1649–1697)

Peter Vanderbank or Vandrebanc (1649–1697) was a French-English engraver.
Life
Vanderbank was born in Paris in 1649, and studied his art there under Nicolas Poilly. About 1674 he accompanied Henri Gascar to England, and gained a reputation as an engraver of portraits, which he executed on a larger scale than any previously produced in this country. He appears to have had five sons, including the painter John Vanderbank. On his prints his name is always spelt Vandrebanc. He received little remuneration for his work, and at the end of life was in reduced circumstances. He died in 1697 at Bradfield, Hertfordshire, the residence of John Forester, whose sister he had married, and was buried on 4 October in the church of Cottered-cum-Bradfield.
A mezzotint by George White, inscribed ‘Peter Vanderbank, engraver,’ has been assumed to be a portrait of him, and copied by Ambrose William Warren for the 1849 edition of Horace Walpole's Anecdotes; but the costume is of a somewhat later date, and it may represent one of his sons, who is said to have practised engraving, though his works are not known.
Works
They include portraits of Charles II, James II, Mary Beatrix, the Prince and Princess of Orange, Louis XIV, the Duke of Monmouth, Sir William Temple, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and other prominent persons, chiefly from pictures by Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller, and Gascar; also a ‘Holy Family’ and ‘Christ on the Mount of Olives,’ after Sébastien Bourdon, and three plates from Antonio Verrio's ceilings at Windsor Castle. Vanderbank engraved, from drawings by Edward Lutterell, the earlier portraits in White Kennett's History of England.
The public source identifies “Peter Vanderbank” as french-English engraver (1649–1697). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Peter, Vanderbank and French-English.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7177465. VIAF identifies the subject as 24873055. The Library of Congress control number is no92029779. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1649, 1697, 1674 and 1849.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peter Vanderbank” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.