Support The single, circular, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.4 cm thick. The reverse has regularly spaced saw marks. 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.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, greyish ground extends over the edges of the support and barely fills the grain of the wood. It consists of large white and small ochre-coloured and black pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The background was thinly and smoothly executed, leaving the figure in reserve. A cross-section from a darker greyish area reveals that the background was applied in one layer and consists of large white, small ochre-coloured and black pigment particles. The ground shows through along the contours of the figure, especially along the left side of the head, and has remained partly visible. The boy’s face was built up from dark to light, leaving the shadowed part semi-transparent, whereas the paint in the illuminated area is more dense and opaque. Brushstrokes are visible in the hat and to some extent in the face, and impasto was used for the highlights.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Good. The paint layer has minor losses along the upper right edge, and there are some small areas of discoloured retouching in the background. The varnish has slightly yellowed and appears rather dull.

…; sold by the Duchess of Rutland, Belvoir Castle, 1911;¹¹Note Isaac de Bruijn, RMA; a wax seal on the reverse carries the coat of arms of the Dukes of Rutland.…; from the dealer Paul Cassirer & Co., fl. 2,000, to Isaac de Bruijn (1872-1953), 1933;²²Note Isaac de Bruijn, RMA. donated by Isaac de Bruijn and his wife, Johanna Geertruida van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Spiez and Muri, near Bern, to the museum, 1949, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum, December 1961

Object number: SK-A-4049

Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland

Adriaen van Ostade painted very few likenesses in his long career. Two group portraits by him are known, one of the artist himself with the De Goyer family in Museum Bredius,⁴⁴The Hague; illustrated in A. Blankert, L. Barnouw-de Ranitz and C.J.J. Stall, Museum Bredius: Catalogus van de schilderijen en tekeningen, coll. cat. The Hague 1991, p. 178. and another of an unidentified family in the Louvre.⁵⁵Paris; illustrated in B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade: Zeichnungen und Aquarelle: Gesamtdarstellung mit Werkkatalogen, I, Hamburg 1981, p. 263. Portrait of a Collector, also kept in the Rijksmuseum,⁶⁶SK-A-3281. and the present picture of a young boy shown at bust length in three-quarter profile are among the scant single-figure likenesses in Van Ostade’s extant oeuvre. That this painting should be regarded as a portrait rather than an anonymous tronie is indicated by the lack of attributes, the sitter’s commonplace, bourgeois clothing and individualized facial features. The most striking item of his apparel, the hat with upturned and pinned brim, can also be seen in other pictures with figures wearing contemporary urban dress, such as Jan Miense Molenaer’s Woman Playing the Virginal,⁷⁷SK-C-140. in which it is also worn by a young boy.

Van Ostade may have modelled this portrait on Frans Hals’s circular depictions of young boys executed in the first half of the 1620s, such as the one now in the Mauritshuis.⁸⁸The Hague; illustrated in S. Slive et al., Frans Hals, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (Royal Academy of Arts)/Haarlem (Frans Halsmuseum) 1989-90, p. 177. Apart from the round format, the loose execution of Hals’s paintings may have inspired Van Ostade’s relatively sketchy technique, which is especially noticeable in the boy’s hair and hat. It is also this free brushwork that corroborates the dendrochronological dating of the picture to around the middle of the seventeenth century.⁹⁹See Technical notes.

Two circular portraits by Van Ostade were auctioned in Rotterdam in 1825.¹⁰¹⁰Sale, F. Kamermans, Rotterdam (A. Lamme), 3 October 1825, nos. 76, 77. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to trace them, and the sale catalogue does not specify the age or gender of the sitters. It does, however, indicate that Van Ostade used this distinct format more frequently. Other records suggest that the Rijksmuseum painting is not the only one in which Van Ostade portrayed a boy. Two pendants of the artist’s sons are listed in French auction catalogues from 1793, 1800 and 1822, and Hofstede de Groot mentioned the presence of a bust-length likeness of a boy by Van Ostade in the Jussopoff collection in St Petersburg.¹¹¹¹Sale, Louis-César-Renaud, Duc de Choseul-Praslin, Paris (Paillet and Boileau), 18 February 1793 sqq., no. 60; sale, François-Pascal Haudry, Orléans (auction house not known), 4 August 1800, nos. 108, 109; sale, Robert de Saint-Victor, Paris (Galerie Le Brun), 26 November 1822 sqq., no. 187. C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, III, Esslingen/Paris 1910, p. 417, no. 881.

Jonathan Bikker, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

1976, p. 431, no. A 4049

Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Adriaen van Ostade, Portrait of a Boy, c. 1648 - c. 1655', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20025959