English family of painters of French descent. Nicholas Lizard was born in France, but he entered the service of Henry VIII probably in the late 1520s or early 1530s and may have been the ‘Master Nykolas’ who worked with Holbein at Greenwich Palace in 1527. He succeeded Antonio Toto del Nunziata as SERJEANT PAINTER in 1554. Lizard did much decorative work for royal funerals and coronations. In 1556 he presented Queen Mary with a New Year gift of a panel ‘painted with the Maundy’, and in 1558 he gave Queen Elizabeth a panel representing the ‘history of Ahasuerus’. He was buried at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on 5 April 1571.