Corneille de Lyon

Sir Charles Henry Ibbetson Bt. (1814-1861) of Denton Park, Yorkshire;
Thence by direct family descent.

A. Dubois de Groër, Corneille de La Haye dit Corneille de Lyon, Paris 1996, p. 207, cat. no. 117, reproduced.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden, an external expert who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is on a slim little panel, which has remained almost completely flat with no sign of flaking or movement in the paint, in the past or the present. This painting is beautifully preserved, with the translucent maturity of the paint and minute craquelure. The brushwork is immaculately intact in every slightest delicate detail of the costume. The discreet depth of tone and colour is also finely unworn in the darks for instance of the hat and rich green of the background. This has a few tiny retouchings and an old damage at the right edge, with old retouching down the outer edge to the base, and slightly at the other left base corner. The glazing and detail in the face is almost perfectly intact, with perhaps faint wear along the left of the collar. Essentially this lovely small portrait has remained unusually undisturbed and well preserved. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

This striking portrait, which has remained in the same family's collection for nearly two hundred years, is as notable for the immediacy of its execution as much as for its exceptional state of preservation. Such is the spontaneity of brushwork and draughtsmanship that it seems highly probable the portrait was painted from life with only minimal, if any, subsequent finishing or working up of the surface in the artist's studio. For the sitter's jacket Corneille has left exposed the ivory-coloured ground, achieving its form with only a few confident strokes of brown wash. Anne Dubois de Groër, who dated the work to the artist's maturity circa 1555, noted the aisance and souplesse with which the jacket has been executed. Not uncommonly for Corneille, the background was painted before the portrait itself.

Although Netherlandish by birth, Corneille de la Haye, later Corneille de Lyon, spent his working life in France, first as court painter to Queen Eleanor, second wife of François I, and later to Henri II, who appointed him Peintre du Roi in 1548. He had received his naturalisation papers in 1547 and he retained French nationality for the rest of his life. Corneille's great concern was the rendering of lifelike expression in his sitters and this becomes more and more evident in his later works when the precise nature of his native Dutch style is replaced by something more flexible and immediate. Almost without exception his portraits follow a set pattern; the sitter is presented bust- or half-length, in three-quarter pose against a usually green background, the concentration always on the facial features with the costume and arms usually, although not always, less minutely expressed.