Associate of Corneille de Lyon, 'Portrait of a Man holding a Scroll and Gloves', probably about 1550

A middle-aged man with a luxuriant beard gazes past us into the distance. He holds a scroll in one hand and lays the other across a pair of brown leather gloves which rest on a table. His black hat has lappets, turned up and fastened to the brim; in cold weather they could have been let down over the ears and tied under the chin. We don‘t know who the man is, though a very similar portrait of him, minus the hands, is in the Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco. The clothes and the cut of the beard indicate that it was probably painted in around 1550.

The picture is painted in oils on a limewood panel, with a chalk ground and a very thin priming of lead white pigment. Technical analysis revealed some underdrawing, with minor changes and one major change: the right hand and scroll are painted on top of an area that was partially scraped out. The original hand is still present, higher than the visible hand and clutching a different object. Oddly, the hands seem to have been painted by different artists. The altered right hand is painted in a different technique to the face and left hand, using little or no blue. The hands seem to have been derived from paintings by Jean Clouet, father of François Clouet.

When the painting was bequeathed to the National Gallery in the late nineteenth century, its owner, Wynn Ellis, believed it to be by Holbein. Indeed it was probably one of two portraits described as by Holbein which were in the library of his house in Cadogan Place, London (the other was A Man holding a Glove by Jean Gossart). Since it entered our collection it has been variously described as ’Flemish School‘, ’French School, Sixteenth Century (Imitation)‘, and ’French(?) School, Sixteenth(?) Century', and it has been suggested that it should be associated with Corneille de Lyon.

There seems no reason not to think the painting is sixteenth century. It may have been painted by an associate of Corneille, perhaps a former assistant, who knew the work of the Clouets. The artist, whoever he was, has distorted the figure in various ways. The hands are rather small; the cranium is shrunk and the eyebrows raised; the eyes are much too far apart; the near eye is different in shape from the far eye and occupies too much of the near side of the face. The end of the nose is too far in profile and the chin seems to have been lengthened. Some of the same distortions are found in a portrait of an unidentified man in the collection of Gene Accas in Los Angeles.

There are two seals on the back in red wax, which were used to secure a piece of paper. They are from the same matrix – a mould in which something is cast or shaped – and show the profile of a man with a long beard. The impression may have been made from a cameo of around 1550.