Follower of Peter Gertner, 
German c.1495/1500-after 1541- 
Portrait of a lady - a sketch; 
oil,...

Follower of Peter Gertner, 
German c.1495/1500-after 1541- 

Portrait of a lady - a sketch; 

oil, black lead pencil and brown chalk on canvas, unstretched, 25.4 x 18.4 cm. 

Provenance: 
Private Collection, UK. 

Note: 
The sitter’s clothing in this sensitively painted, unfinished portrait suggest a German or Flemish attribution, rather than French. The hood is quite characteristic, and the garment may be that of a middle-class woman, though the lack of costume detail, due to its unfinished state, makes it difficult to assess the sitter’s role or status. The underdrawing, clearly visible in the unpainted areas of the sketch, suggests that this was used for the central placement of the features, the head and the shoulders, as any slight changes would be masked by the overpainting in oil of the completed portrait. The striking impact of the work here owes much to its unfinished state, the prominent prepared canvas support in which the 'imprimatura' is tonally dominant in the painting, and the miniaturist’s attention to detail in the face. Indeed, the directness of the sitter's gaze, whose presence is so strongly conveyed, draws the viewer in very effectively. The focus is on the head alone, and the facial features are finely and delicately rendered. At present, the sitter in this beguiling portrait has not been identified. 

In the late 1530s, Nuremberg artist Peter Gertner produced a remarkable series of highly innovative and extremely powerful portrait studies of his principal patrons. Executed on the same scale as the paintings for which they were studies, these modelli consisted of rapidly sketched outline drawings of the sitters, bust length, within which only the faces, and in a couple of cases also the hands, are carefully worked up. This extremely fine portrait is very much reminiscent of these head types by Gertner. See, for comparison, his 'Portrait of Ottheinrich von der Pfalz' which sold at Christie's, New York, 6 April 2006, lot 15 ($553,600).