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The aim of this paper is to discuss the possible use of Dutch and Flemish prints and drawings by some of the immigrant portrait painters active in Sweden in the first part of the seventeenth century, a period when the demand for portraits was booming. Painters such as Jacob Heinrich Elbfas, born in Livonia and trained in Strasbourg; and Cornelius Arendtz, son of the Dutch immigrant painter Arendt Lamprechtz, painted portraits in a style that they repeated and copied from portrait to portrait. Other painters, most of them nameless to us today, were also contributing to the production of similar-looking portraits. The linear character of these portraits, as well as their similarity in terms of setting and poses, suggests a dependence on drawings, templates, and prints. 

In his Kristinatidens måleri (1955), Karl Erik Steneberg labelled the portrait painters active in Sweden in the first half of the seventeenth Century as guild painters stuck in repeating a belated, derivative style, before Queen Christina came to power, and Horst Gerson (1942) wrote about Elbfas that ‘viel Abwechslung vermag er im allgemeinen nicht zu geben.‘ Steneberg’s and Gerson’s motivation was to point out a lack of originality and variation in early seventeenth-century painting in Sweden, allegedly caused by a lack of foreign impulses. However, the increased production of portraits in Sweden follows a similar market logic as the serial production that prospered in the workshops of the Low Countries at the same time (Jager 2020; van den Brink 2001), represented by the workshops of painters such as the portraitist Michiel van Mierewelt (Jansen, Ekkart & Verhave 2011). The style of the portraits painted in Sweden might have been belated, but the rationalised working methods for producing portraits were contemporary.