The support is an oak panel consisting of three vertically grained planks. Bevels on the top and bottom edges and traces of the ground and paint along the left and right edges indicate that the panel has retained its original dimensions. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1631. The panel could have been ready for use by 1642, but a date in or after 1648 is more likely. The thin ground layer is off-white. The broad brushstrokes visible under the paint layer are either from the ground layer or from an imprimatura. The portrait is executed in a smooth and schematic manner. The paint was applied thickly and opaquely with some impasto in the sitter’s ruff. The sitter’s moustache was reserved in the ruff.

Fair. The edges of the panel are damaged. There is raised paint along the grain and there are scratches in the paint layer at bottom centre. The varnish was applied unevenly.

…; on loan to the museum from the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap since 1889

Object number: SK-C-1553

Credit line: On loan from the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap

This bust-length portrait is of an unknown, 54-year-old man. Since the painting has no provenance it is not at present possible to identify him. The rather sketchy execution suggests that it is a copy. There is no known original, but on the evidence of the stylistic relationship to the work of the Amsterdam portraitist Cornelis van der Voort it is assumed that it is based on one of his paintings.¹¹According to the 1976 catalogue of the collection, the annotation and date are on the back of the panel, but in fact they are on the front. On the back there is a label with writing that was scored through long ago and is now illegible. The 1619 date on the present painting would have been copied from the prototype. Dendrochronology, which provides a likely date of execution in or after 1648, indicates that this copy was made some 30 years after the original.²²See Technical notes.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 327.

1903, p. 290, no. 2593 (as copy after Cornelis van der Voort); 1976, p. 589, no. C 1553 (as copy after Cornelis van der Voort); 2007, no. 327

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'follower of Cornelis van der Voort, Portrait of a Man, in or after c. 1648', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20029255