Portrait of Sir John North (c.1551-1597), bust-length

The sitter was the eldest son of Roger, 2nd Baron North of Kirtling, Cambridgeshire. He was educated at Peterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, and admitted as an M.A. in 1572. He served as a volunteer in the Netherlands in 1579-80 and was elected M.P. for Cambridgeshire in 1584 and in subsequent parliaments: he returned to serve in the Dutch cause in 1585 and in 1597, dying in Flanders in the latter year. The eldest son of his marriage to Dorothy, daughter and heiress of Sir Valentine Dale, Dudley, succeeded his grandfather as 3rd Baron North in 1600.

The present picture has a traditional attribution to an otherwise unrecorded artist known as 'The Younger Cranius'. A version is in the collection at the Vyne, Basingstoke (National Trust).