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Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen (London 1593 – 1661 Utrecht) Portrait of a Gentleman inscribed and dated in the lower right: CJC 16?4 Provenance: Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen was an English-born painter of German decent. His family originally came from Cologne, later settling in Antwerp before fleeing to London to escape the religious persecution of the Duke of Alva in 1568. Cornelis Janssens probably received his artistic training in the northern Netherlands. His early portraits possess an Anglo-Netherlandish style and bear loose similarities with Marcus Gheeraerts the younger of Bruges. Documentary evidence confirms that Janssens returned to England in 1618 and worked as a portrait painter until 1643. His production attests to his popularity; he is the first English-born painter known to have produced such a vast number of signed portraits. Most of the artist’s works during this period are portraits of affluent people from relatively high social strata, painted in a conservative style, bust length and with an accurate portrayal of the sitters’ features. The influence of Daniel Mijtens I and Anthony van Dyck is present in various aspects of his portraiture from the 1630s and is most notable in his large-scale works such as the Family of Arthur, Lord Capel (National Portrait Gallery, London). The Baroque composition of this group portrait reveals Janssens’ interest especially in the work of van Dyck. In 1643, when the English Civil War began, Janssens, further prompted by his wife, relocated his family to Amsterdam. The works he produced during this period were primarily half-length and three-quarter length portraits noted for their elegance, precise rendering of the sitters’ facial features and sensitivity to their individual characteristics. Although his technique showed greater finesse and lightness in this period, his paintings at the same time became much larger in scale. In the present work, the artist juxtaposed a highly detailed representation of the sitter against a uniform, green tinged background, thus contrasting this subtle color accent with a virtuoso display of black-on-black in the man’s fancy costume. A similar pose showing the sitter with his right arm akimbo with palm facing outwards, and his left arm slightly raised, was repeated by Janssens in three other known portraits; one of which also depicts a gentleman holding a pair of gloves. According to a 1929 catalogue from Galleria Pesaro in Milan, where our painting was last offered for sale, the gentleman represented was the mayor of Haarlem, (“Ritratto del Borgomastro di Arlen Haarlen”).
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