Portrait of Duke Charles of Angoulême

1536 was the year Corneille de Lyon, a Netherlandish painter settled in the city of Lyon, began portraying the French royal family, work that would earn him the title of king's painter a few years later. This is one of those early royal likenesses. Charles, the third son of King Francis I, is painted as a boy against the plain coloured ground Corneille used for almost every sitter. The panel is tiny, about the size of a hand, the sort of intimate portrait kept close rather than shown in a great hall. Charles would live only to 23, dying in 1545 of an illness he caught, by one account, while recklessly entering plague-sealed houses on campaign. The little portrait passed eventually into the Uffizi, far from the French court it was made for.