Studies of a child’s head, said to be Henry VIII of England,
oil on canvas, 40 x 48 cm, framed

Provenance:
art market, Russia, 1970s;
where acquired by the present owner

Exhibited:
Cagliari, Cittadella dei Musei, Rubens e la pittura fiamminga del ‘600,
23 May – 30 June 1990, no. 53 (as Willem Panneels)

Literature:
D. Bodart (ed.), Rubens e la pittura fiamminga del ‘600, exhibition catalogue, Cagliari 1990, pp. 92-93, no. 53, illustrated p. 161 (as Willem Panneels);
M.Jaffé, Rubens. Milan and Cagliari, in: The Burlington Magazine, vol. 132, no. 1050, September 1990, p. 660, not illustrated

The present painting relates to a terracotta bust by Guido Mazzoni (circa 1455 – 1518) Henry VIII when a young boy (?), in Hampton Court Palace, Royal Collection, London (inv. no. RCIN 731979). The rapport between these two works is extremely close and this would imply that the painter of this painting had direct knowledge of the sculpture conserved in the English Court. Michael Jaffé noted also that the present canvas must have been copied directly from Mazzoni’s polychromed portrait bust, but did not confirm Didier Bodart’s attribution of the present work to Willem Panneels, stating that Panneels would have had to have had access to Charles I’s collection to have executed the present picture (see literature).

Mazzoni’s bust was sculpted around 1498 and has been speculatively matched with the entry in 1549-50 inventory of Henry VIII‘s pictures listing ‘thimage of King Henrie theight wrought on (sic) earth’ kept in the ´King’s Secrete Studdie’ in the so-called Holbein Gate (see J. Larson, A Polychrome Terracotta Bust of a Laughing Child at Windsor Castle, in: The Burlington Magazine, no. 1038, 1989, pp. 618-624). The position of the two heads on the canvas is reminiscent of a silver-point drawing by Hans Holbein the Elder of his children, in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (inv. no. KdZ 2507) and an oil sketch by Anthony van Dyck, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Anne, in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (inv. no. PG 310).