Cornelis or Cornelius Ketel (1548 – 1616)

• Was a Dutch painter.
• Ketel was born in Gouda.
• At the age of 18, he became a student of Anthonie Blocklandt.
• He later traveled to Paris where he lived with Jean de la Hame.
• From Paris he went to Fontainebleau, where he was working in 1566.
• He was forced to leave France in 1567 when all citizens of the Habsburg Netherlands were expelled.
• Next, Ketel is recorded in England, and was one of several exiled Netherlandish artists active at the Tudor court in the 1570s.
• Cornelis Ketel married Aeltgen Gerrits in London in 1573.
• In 1578, permission was granted for a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, when on a visit to Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset at Hanworth Park House in Middlesex.
• Ketel returned to the Low Countries as his son Rafaël was born in Amsterdam in 1581.

• Ketel introduced the full-length group portrait format to the Dutch burghers with great success, to have been mostly commissioned as a portraitist.
• He also painted some religious subjects.
• His pupil was the Danish-born Pieter Isaacsz, and Wouter Crabeth from Gouda. • After the death of wife in 1602, he remarried in 1607 to Aeltge Jans.

• Ketel suffered a stroke and made his will in November 1613, witnessed by Hendrick de Keyser.

• He died in August 1616.
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