Corneille de Lyon, 'Portrait of a Man in a Black Biretta', possibly 1538-61

A man with blue eyes and a brown beard – slightly reddish below his mouth – looks out at us from this small picture. We don't know who he is but his black hat, known as a biretta, and his clothing indicate that he is a priest or a lawyer. He may well have been an important person: Corneille de Lyon and his workshop produced at least three versions of this portrait (the others are in the Musée Jaquemart-André, Paris and in a private collection in Switzerland).

The picture is painted in oils on a walnut panel. The panel was covered in a chalk ground and primed with a thin layer of lead white pigment. Infrared photographs and reflectograms do not reveal any underdrawing: Corneille perhaps painted from life. The original frame (now lost) seems to have been fitted almost immediately, before the paint was fully dry – as also happened with Corneille’s Bust Portrait of a Man – and it has left marks in the paint surface at the side edges. There are also traces of gilding and, just below the contour of the shoulder, a fragment of wood from the original frame.

Corneille and his workshop produced numerous small portraits of notables of the French court, following a similar formula with slight differences in scale. He was presumably good at catching a flattering likeness and saw no need to experiment with a successful pattern. Here, the sitter is shown in close up against a green background. Corneille has narrowed his shoulders and reduced the cranium to enlarge the face – as was usual for the artist, although he did not usually exaggerate the proportions as much as here. Also as usual for him, the head is at a slight angle and the eyes are set wide apart.

Very few portraits attributed to Corneille are dated or closely datable. The exaggerated proportions of the head, however, might suggest that this was done late in his career, close to the portrait of Cardinal Robert de Lenoncourt, painted between 1538 and 1561, of which various versions survive.