Portrait of a Man
c. 1555
Medium
Oil on panel
Dimensions
24 × 18.5 cm (9 7/16 × 7 5/16 in.); Framed: 35.3 × 30.5 × 4.5 cm (13 7/8 × 12 × 1 3/4 in.)
Classification
oil on panel
Department
Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
79774
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Dutch-born painter Corneille de Lyon employed a limited selection of colors to great effect in this small painting. The textured, green background accentuates the subject’s velvety black outfit, lace collar, pale skin, and bristly beard. Corneille specialized in this stylized type of small, finely painted precious portraiture, working primarily for the court and bourgeois elite of 16th-century Lyon, France, where he lived most of his life. The sitter’s exaggerated proportions direct the viewer’s...
About the Artist
Corneille de Lyon · 1533–1575
Corneille de Lyon, born around 1500 in The Hague in the Netherlands, emerged as one of the premier portraitists of the French Renaissance after settling in Lyon by 1533. A Netherlandish artist who became naturalized as a French citizen in 1547, he quickly rose in prominence, serving as official painter to the Dauphin (later Henry II) from around 1540 and continuing under Henry II and Charles IX as...