Not all those Londoners who painted for a living in this era were members of a guild, much less of the Painter-Stainers’ Company with its statutory jurisdiction within the City and four miles around. Yet the Company nicely exemplifies the pressures placed upon painters in general, and especially in London, in this period. Its activities and concerns reflect those of individual painters and of painters’ guilds elsewhere as well as in the metropolis. The prominence of that Company, and of London itself, makes it a very useful place to begin a consideration of native English painters of this era. Few Company records exist from before 1623, when the first surviving minute book of its ruling body, the Court of Assistants, begins. But few of the Company's numerous concerns recorded in that book were new at that time, so that the minute book offers a finer grained description of activities and organization which had been ongoing for some time.

Like most companies, the Painter-Stainers were sensitive to the pressures which threatened to disrupt traditional activities and goals both from within and without. The effectiveness of any guild or livery company – the term applied to London guilds of this era – seeking to uphold its reputation and sustain its authority rested on several pillars. The protection of its members’ interests of an economic and, to a degree, civic and social, nature loomed as the sine qua non of any company's operation. That protection included the maintenance of sufficient fraternal bonds amongst members to ensure their loyalty and active participation. Such bonding activities extended to the mediation of disputes amongst members, to the provision of alms and other services for the less fortunate members and their families, and to a ritual programme of commensality and ceremony engineered to foster fraternal harmony. Along with those goals, companies had forcefully to establish and maintain standards of craftsmanship so as to protect the reputation of the whole. They did this especially by ensuring the proper training of apprentices and by exercising the power of search against shoddy or fraudulent work. Failure to carry out these responsibilities could bring an entire occupation into disrepute. Each livery and guild experienced and dealt with these concerns in its own ways. The Painter-Stainers’ were no different.