Portrait of a young man

Corneille de Lyon, a painter born in the Netherlands who made his career in Lyon, specialised in small likenesses like this one, each hardly bigger than a hand. A single head and shoulders sits against a plain green ground, and nothing else competes for attention. No drawings by him survive, which tells us he worked straight onto the panel, laying in the hair, the faint beard and the fur trim with a miniaturist's patience. He and his workshop produced dozens of these for the French court, small enough to carry or send as a gift. This young man's name is lost, as it is for most of his sitters, so what you are left with is a face, closely observed, and the plain green behind it.