Lot 21: Corneille de la Haye, called Corneille de Lyon (The Hague 1500/10-1575 Lyons)

Corneille de la Haye, called Corneille de Lyon (The Hague 1500/10-1575 Lyons)
Portrait of a lady, bust-length, in a blue silk dress
oil on panel, oval
6¼ x 4¾ in. (15.8 x 12.1 cm.)

Adolph Thiem (1832-1923), Berlin, by whom given in 1899 (according to a label on the reverse) to
Gustavo Frizzoni, art historian (1840-1919), and by descent to the family of the present owner.

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
This jewel-like composition corresponds with a portrait by Corneille de Lyon, the prototype of which is in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and that Dubois de Groër dates, on the basis of the costume, to 1535-1540. While the Moscow picture depicts the sitter bust-length, Dubois lists a half-length version in which the sitter is depicted holding a puppy (sold in these Rooms, 13 December 2000, lot 110 for £152,250). A further three versions of the portrait are listed by Dubois, showing the sitter in a reverse pose and without an animal (Corneille de la Haye dit Corneille de Lyon, Paris, 1996, pp. 118-121). The present version is the only one known in which the sitter bears a halo and holds a lamb, indicating that the lady is here depicted as Saint Agnes.
Traditionally considered to be portraits of Queen Claude of France (1499-1524), Dubois de Groër discredits this traditional identification on the grounds that they resemble neither the Queen's statue on her tomb in Saint-Denis, nor other depictions of her in crayon and miniature.

As the label on the reverse records, the panel was presumably given to the famous 19th century art crtic and collector Gustavo Frizzoni (a forebear of the present owner) by Baron Adolph Thiem. The latter earned a considerable fortune from financial investments and set about collecting the work of 19th century artists including Karl Gussow, Ludwig Knaus and Adolph von Menzel, as well as those of the Barbizon school. On moving into a new home that he named the Villa Thiem, he turned his attention more to the acquisition of predominantly Dutch and Flemish masters of the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as earlier pictures, and is recorded as owning at least one by Corneille de Lyon. Many of his most important works were acquired in 1904 by the Berlin museums, five years after the present work was given to Frizzoni.

Gustavo Frizzoni, son of Clementina Reichmann, lived in Milan with his friend and mentor Giovanni Morelli, the celebrated art historian who left much of his collection to the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and whose biography Frizzoni wrote. Towards the end of the 19th century, Frizzoni travelled extensively with Morelli in Italy and other European countries including Germany, where he presumably would have met Baron Thiem. He died in Milan in 1910, leaving his library and archives to the Brera Academy, and his extensive collection to various public institutions and family heirs.