Cornelis or Cornelius Ketel was a Dutch Mannerist painter, active in Elizabethan London from 1573 to 1581, and in Amsterdam from 1581 to the early 17th century, now known essentially as a portrait-painter, though he was also a poet and orator, and from 1595 began to sculpt as well.
According to Ketel's biography, written by his contemporary Karel van Mander, he seems to have wanted to concentrate on the most prestigious of the hierarchy of genres, history painting, which included mythological subjects, but after he left France he is known almost entirely as a portrait-painter. Neither England nor Holland had much demand for large history paintings during his lifetime, and none of Ketel's histories or allegorical paintings are known to have survived intact, although drawings and prints survive. He did however significantly influence the development of the largest type of painting commonly produced in the United Provinces at this period, the civic group portrait.
Ketel was born out of wedlock in Gouda in 1548 and apprenticed to his uncle Cornelis Jacobsz. Ketel (died c. 1568) at age 11. He is said to have been encouraged to pursue a career in painting by the stained glass painter Dirck Crabeth, whose brother Wouter's wife may have been related to Ketel. He studied under Anthonie Blocklandt in Delft, c. 1565, before travelling to Paris where he lived with Jean de la Hame, glass-painter to King Charles IX. From Paris he went to Fontainebleau, where he was working in 1566, in the final years of the First School of Fontainebleau, a sojourn which was no doubt decisive in forming his taste for Mannerist allegory. He was forced to leave France in 1567 when all citizens of the Habsburg Netherlands were expelled.
He returned to Gouda, but the economy there was severely hit by the occupation of the city in 1572 by the Geuzen or rebels, followed in 1573 by a plague which killed 20% of the population; the Dutch Revolt was entering a new and deeper phase that destabilised daily life throughout the Netherlands. By 1573 Ketel is recorded in England, and was one of several exiled Netherlandish artists active at the Tudor court in the 1570s. His friend Carel van Mander notes his portrait of Sir Christopher Hatton, of the Earl of Oxford, and various noblemen, their wives and children. In 1578, permission was granted for a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, when on a visit to the duchess of Somerset at Hamworth House.
Finding no market in England for his preferred allegorical subjects, Ketel returned to the Low Countries before 1581, where he later introduced the full-length group portrait format to the Dutch burghers with great success, and seems still to have been mostly commissioned as a portraitist. The Dutch taste emerging from the revolt was hostile to Mannerist allegory and even to simpler mythological subjects in art, which were widely associated with the hated Habsburgs, the rulers against whom the Dutch were rebelling. He also painted some religious subjects.
Cornelis van der Voort (born ca. 1576) is thought to have been a pupil of Ketel's; he became a successful Amsterdam portraitist. The Danish-born Pieter Isaacsz was certainly a pupil, and van Mander mentions others. The early 18th-century Gouda historian Ignatius Walvis says that the artist Wouter Pietersz. Crabeth (1594–1644), grandson and namesake of the glass-painter, studied under Ketel. [unreliable source?] Ketel suffered a stroke in 1613 and died in Amsterdam in 1616.
Ketel quickly established himself as a successful painter of portraits in London. Karel van Mander records that Ketel was patronized by the prosperous German Hansa merchants of the Steelyard and that a Force overcome by Wisdom and Prudence commissioned from him and presented to Sir Christopher Hatton introduced him to court circles. Hatton commissioned a portrait and Queen Elizabeth I sat to him in 1578. Ketel's large output in these years, much of which is now lost, can be estimated by the quantity of his known commissions. In 1577 Ketel was commissioned to paint a series of 19 portraits for the Cathay Company, one of which is the famous (but very damaged) full-length of Martin Frobisher now in the Bodleian Library. and several "great" paintings of the Inuit man Frobisher had brought back to England. Ketel's self-portrait, which was engraved by Hendrick Bary, is in the Royal Collection. Recently, a series of head-and-shoulders paintings of members of the family of Thomas "Customer" Smythe dated 1579, now widely dispersed, has been identified as the work of Cornelis Ketel.
Apparently, all of Ketel's allegorical paintings have been lost, however, a formerly lost masterpiece was discovered and exhibited at the Tate Museum, London, in 1995, in a major exhibition entitled Dynasties. Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530-1630. Attribution as to title of this work, this may be the lost "Triumph of Wisdom and Prudence over Force" 1580, painted in England. (Miedema-Schulting 1988)[incomplete short citation] Referred to as "Allegory", this fragment, which was recently discovered, today forms, together with the reverse of no. 55, the sole remnant of Ketel's rich production of painted allegories, described in detail in van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck of 1604 [Miedema 1994].[citation needed]

More...