After Quentin Massys, 
Flemish 1465/6-1530- 
Portrait of a canon, probably Stephen Gardiner; 
oil...

After Quentin Massys, 
Flemish 1465/6-1530- 

Portrait of a canon, probably Stephen Gardiner; 

oil on panel, 45.1 x 35.6 cm. (unframed). 

Provenance: 
Private Collection, Flanders, thence by descent. 
Private Collection, France, thence by descent. 
Private Collection, UK. 

Note: 
The present work is a copy with minor variations, including the colour of the sitter's clothing, after Massys's original portrait in the Princely Collections of Liechtenstein [GE 928].

The accompanying note for the original describes how: 'There have been various attempts to identify the sitter in the present work, but none has proved wholly convincing. On the evidence of his exquisitely rendered costume, however, he must have been a canon in the sense of being a secular clergyman associated with a cathedral or a collegiate church. Massys ensures that his imposing physical presence all but fills the available space, and shows him seated behind a parapet and in front of a far-ranging and meticulously observed landscape. The way in which he looks straight out at the viewer establishes a timelessly direct contact. The fiction of the image is that he has just looked up from his reading: the fingers of his left hand are keeping two different places in his book, while the pince-nez held in his right hand have evidently just been removed from his nose. The sense of a living, thinking human presence is brilliantly evoked, and indeed this is arguably the greatest of all Massys’ portraits.' 

The portrait likely depicts Stephen Gardiner (1483-1555), a prominent Catholic bishop and politician during the English Reformation, who served as Lord Chancellor under Queen Mary I.