CONGNET, Gillis - b. ~1538 Antwerpen, d. 1599 Hamburg

Flemish painter. The son of a goldsmith of the same name, he trained as a painter with Lambert Wenselyns (active 1553) and possibly also with Antoon van Palermo (1503 or 1513-c. 1589), an Antwerp art dealer in whose house he lived. In 1561 he became a free master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke. Shortly afterwards he travelled to Italy, going first to Naples and Sicily and then to Terni, where he made frescoes with a painter named Stello. In 1568 he was registered as a member of the Accademia in Florence.

He must have returned to Antwerp in 1570, for between that year and 1585 his name appears in the register of the city’s Guild of St Luke, of which he became Dean in 1585. A year later, on the arrival of Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, he moved to Amsterdam, where he was granted citizenship in 1589. Later he moved to Hamburg.

Pierson La Hues

Gillis Congnet was - beside Anthonis Mor and Frans Pourbus the Elder - one of the important Flemish portrait painters of the second half of the 16th century. The portrait of Pierson La Hues, drummer and page of the Old Archers’ Guild, was painted by him in 1581. This painting is a marvelous representative of a genre which, in the 16th century, was the least rated of the painter’s specialisms. As the portrait is closest to life, contemporary opinion deemed it to be much less creative or intellectual than mythological, biblical or moralistic painting. Nevertheless, this portrait provides us with one of the most lively documents of the 16th century.