Professor Haspels in her Attic Black-figured Lekythoi has described the work of the Theseus painter and analysed his style. In this account of him she naturally gives more consideration to his lekythoi than to the other shapes that he decorated, but his numerous skyphoi, painted in the ‘White Heron’ workshop, are listed in full and briefly discussed. Miss Haspels describes the Theseus painter as the moving spirit in this busy undertaking, until at last, she suggests, he may have ‘got weary of inspiring the hacks in the “Heron workshop” and of witnessing their decay’ and so left and went elsewhere. Later she adds that ‘that workshop apparently turned out skyphoi before he joined’, but the theme has never been developed, and there is now a general tendency to attribute all skyphoi from this shop that are not by his hand to followers or imitators of the Theseus painter without further qualification. This may be somewhat misleading, since followers and imitators are necessarily later than what they follow and imitate. I hope to show that the shop in which the Theseus painter painted his skyphoi was a flourishing concern, making both skyphoi and kylikes, before he entered it, and that some of his companions, so far from being imitators, were his seniors and to some extent his teachers.