Portrait of a Man, identified as Anne de Montmorency (1493 - 1567)

The museum dates this little panel 1533 or 1536, and both years come from the sitter's movements. Anne de Montmorency, then Grand Master of France and a marshal, is recorded in Lyon in 1533 for the formal entry of Queen Eleanor into the city, and again in 1536, when the royal court stayed there. Lyon was where Corneille kept his workshop. The panel is only about 16 centimetres high, and the museum's title still says identified as, so the name rests on scholarship. He wears a black cap with a white plume and a dark doublet striped with gold braid. In 1538 King Francis the First made him Constable, the highest military office in France. He fell from favour in 1541 and came back when Henry the Second took the throne in 1547. He was 74 when he was mortally wounded leading the royal army against the Protestants at Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, in 1567. The picture later belonged to the Polignac family, at their château of Saint-Pal-de-Chalencon in central France, and the museum bought it from the dealers Wildenstein in 1924.