Portrait of a lady, half length, traditionally identified as Marie de Lorraine (1515-1560)

Considered along with Jean and François Clouet as the father of French portraiture, Corneille de Lyon was born in The Hague to Flemish parents. He trained in the city of Antwerp before moving to Lyon, where he is first recorded in 1533, and where he swiftly rose to prominence. By 1541, Corneille was granted the prominent position of ‘peintre et valet de chambre du roi’ by the ‘dauphin’, or heir apparent, Henri, upon his accession to the throne in 1547. This elevated position brought the artist numerous commissions, which in turn translated into financial success, as testified by the various properties that he subsequently acquired in Lyon and the surrounding countryside. As a testament to Corneille’s eminent reputation, in 1544, the poet Eustorge de Beaulieu devoted a rondeau to the painter: ‘To produce a fine likeness from life / no one in France compares to Corneille’ (cited in A. Dubois de Groër, Corneille De La Haye, dit Corneille De Lyon, Paris, 1996, p. 19). Corneille, a Protestant, ran a prosperous workshop that produced portraits for members of the court and bourgeoisie until about 1565, the year he visited Antwerp. The reversal of his fortunes may have much to do with Lyon’s transition to Catholicism in the course of the 1560s. Indeed, by 1569 Corneille and his family were compelled to recant their Protestant faith.

Though unknown to Anne Dubois de Groër, the present painting is typical of Corneille’s portraits for the upwardly mobile classes of French society. Dr. Alexandra Zvereva dates the painting to circa 1560 in the artist’s maturity. Dr. Zvereva notes that while Corneille worked almost exclusively for the bourgeois and nobles of Lyon at this time, it is also known that he was visited by Catherine de Medici during Charles IX's ‘Grand Tour’ in 1565. The sitter of this portrait could thus be a lady-in-waiting to the queen mother, as she is certainly of high birth.

Shown almost to the waist and as if leaning slightly forward, this format and pose appeared frequently in Corneille’s work. While the form of the young woman’s costume is depicted with quick, single thick brushstrokes, more delicate lines are employed for the patterns of the sleeves and collar. Turned three-quarters to her right, towards the light, her skin tone is smooth and the eye contours are fine, rose-toned and broken, with the lips blurred and the hair treated with hard to increasingly fine strokes. At some point in the painting’s history, Corneille’s characteristically luminescent colored background appears to have been overpainted to the present uniform black.

We are grateful to Dr. Alexandra Zvereva for endorsing the attribution following firsthand inspection and for her kind assistance cataloguing this lot.