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Portrait of a Man
Corneille de Lyon (French, c. 1505-1575)
c. 1555
- Medium
- Oil on panel
- Classification
- Painting
- 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.)
- Culture
- France
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Gift of Everett D. Graff
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
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 attention to his head and thus to his quiet yet self-assured expression. His confident posture and expensive clothes, along with the exceptional reputation of his portraitist, speak to his high social status.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
