Frans Floris

William Cowper, London;

By whom sold, London, Phillips, 1 July 1997, lot 68;

With Colnaghi, London, by 1998;

From whom acquired by the late collector.

C. van de Velde, Frans Floris (1519/20-1570): Leven en werken, Brussels 1975, Vol. I, pp. 185-186, under cat. no. 34 and Vol. II, fig. 5.

New York, Colnaghi, An Exhibition of Master Drawings, 7-30 May 1998, no. 8;

Frans Floris pioneered in Flanders the creation of carefully observed head studies, painted from life, which he retained in his workshop to serve as models for future compositions. The present head appears as one of the figures in Floris' 1550 panel Banquet of the Gods in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.

These head studies allowed Floris to regulate the quality of his assistants’ work and to save time from inventing new figure types.

This practice was recorded by Karel van Mander in his Het Schilder-Boeck (1604), where he described how the painter would ‘set his journeymen to do the dead coloring [the paint or underpainting, usually in monochrome or reduced color, applied over the ground and underdrawing to block in a composition] after he had indicated to them his intention somewhat with chalk, letting them get on with it, after having said: Put in these or those heads; for he always had a few of those to hand on panels’ (fol. 242v). The practice became enormously popular in Antwerp, famously influencing the workshop practice of great seventeenth masters like Rubens, van Dyck and Jordaens.