A bust of a woman attributed to Cornelius Janssen van Ceulen

 

 

The style of the ruff provides an initial clue to the date of this bust portrait. The ruff is full and particularly opulent, with ‘reticelli’ embroidery at the ends of the godrons, and allows this portrait to be dated to the years 1600–1620. The hairstyle is also characteristic of the period: a bun adorned with flowers.

 

The ruff is a luxury item; a small one requires three to four metres of fine batiste or linen, and the fashion for them spread throughout Europe in the 16th century. The ruff became even more luxurious with the invention of steel needles, which gave new impetus to ‘reticelli’ embroidery and ‘punto y aria’ lace, which were used to adorn it. It was a fashion that was both extravagant and strict, with its shape and volume codified according to country, individual and social status. This fashion endured for nearly a century, between 1545 and 1630.

 

Guillaume Kientz has drawn parallels between this work and those of Alonso Sánchez Coello (1531–32–1588), a Spanish painter and pupil of Anthonis Mor, also known as Antonio Moro (1517–1576), a highly regarded portraitist with an international career. Trained in Portugal, Coello entered the service of the Portuguese court and then followed Joanna of Austria to Spain, where he was appointed chamber painter to Philip II, thus succeeding Antonio Moro. He devoted most of his career to portraiture and helped to establish the conventions governing royal depictions. A portrait after Coello of a similar appearance, held at Knole House in Kent, could indeed support this theory, although an almost identical portrait is attributed to Frans Pourbus the Younger within the same collection.

 

But Alonso Sánchez Coello was not the only painter to copy Antonio Moro’s style or, at times, even some of his works, the models for which were circulated through engravings. Francisco de Holanda and Cristóvão de Morais Lopes were thus able to paint in his style, not to mention his pupils such as Juan Pantoja de la Cruz (1553–1608), to name but one, who produced very similar portraits during the same period. Furthermore, there is still little documentation on the artist, and several of his works are still confused with those of his pupil, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, or with the contemporary works of Sofonisba Anguissola.

 

However, the style of this bust portrait is far less stilted than that of the Spanish school, which sought to freeze the aristocratic figure in a rigid, haughty pose, devoid of any real individual character. A portrait attributed to Coello and held at the National Museum in Kraków might qualify this view, but the example appears to be unique.

It is therefore to the Flemish school that one must look to understand this portrait. The painter Salomon Mesdach produced this type of bust portrait at the same time (Dorotheum auction, Vienna, 24 March 1999), though his treatment of the face is far more realistic than that in our painting. It is worth noting that the portrait of Aulteribe is set within a trompe l’œil oval, as the Flemish painter Marcus II Gerard (1561/62–1635), a painter at the Tudor court, sometimes did in certain paintings.

It is to another painter, whose parents were Flemish but who was born in England – Cornelius Janssen van Ceulen (1593–1661) – that we should turn. Around 1618, he settled in London and produced hundreds of portraits, precisely set within an oval trompe-l’œil, in an effort to give the portrait a three-dimensional quality. In doing so, he imitated the printed portraits of the time, in which famous figures were depicted within an ornate oval frame. Other Flemish painters of the same period, who had settled in London, also employed this technique, such as Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) and Sir Peter Lely (1618–1680). Van Ceulen’s portraits, unlike those of van Dyck, are characterised by a restrained elegance, and whilst his clientele was wealthy, it bore no resemblance to that of van Dyck, who moved in the highest echelons of international society.