Object data
oil on panel
support: height 30.8 cm × width 21.2 cm
painted surface: height 30 cm × width 20.3 cm
Jan Jansz Mostaert
Portrait of an African Man
Mechelen, Haarlem, c. 1525 - c. 1530
Technical notes
The support is a vertically grained oak plank, 0.8 cm thick. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1509. The panel could have been ready for use by 1520, but a date in or after 1534 is more likely. There is an unpainted edge 0.4-0.6 cm wide, and a barbe on all four sides. The unpainted edges are the remains of an integral frame, which has been planed down and probably cut down along the sides. There is a white ground. Infrared reflectography did not reveal any underdrawing, but the X-rays showed that the reserved beard was originally longer and had a different shape (fig. b). The figure is reserved in the blue-green background, which probably consists of azurite with lead white. The face and costume were carefully executed with a great feeling for texture. The red doublet was probably modelled with a rich, dark red (madder?) glaze on a white underpaint.
Scientific examination and reports
- X-radiography: RMA, no. 1037, 1958
- condition report: S. Walden, RMA, 12 March 2004
- condition report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 4 May 2004
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 14 May 2004
- condition report: I. Verslype, RMA, 10 June 2005
Condition
Good. The painting is slightly abraded in the browns and the beard. The red glazes are rather fragile, and there is an old vertical crack to the right of centre.
Provenance
…; the dealer T. Harris, London, 1920;1 …; Dr Hans Wendland, Lugano, 1924;2...; the dealer Galerie Fischer, Luzern, 1924;3 ...; dealer, Galerie Fischer, Luzern, 1924;4 from whom to Sir Thomas D. Barlow G.B.F. (1883-1964), London, 1934;5 his son, Basil Stephen Barlow (1918-91), London;6 from his heirs on loan to Kenwood House, London, 1998-2003;7 from whom, through Simon C. Dickinson Ltd, London, to the dealer R. Noortman, Maastricht, 2004;8 from whom, € 600,000, to the museum, with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Mondriaan Stichting, the VSBfonds, the Stichting Rijksmuseum and the BankGiro Loterij, 2005
Object number: SK-A-4986
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt, with additional funding from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Mondriaan Stichting, the VSBfonds, the BankGiro Lottery and the Rijksmuseum Fonds
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Jan Jansz Mostaert (Haarlem c. 1474 - Haarlem 1552/53)
Jan Jansz Mostaert was born in Haarlem around 1474 to the mill owner Jan Jansz Mostaert and his wife Alijt Dircxdr. He married Angnyese (Agnes) Martijnsdr, the widow of Claes Claesz Suycker, shortly before 8 June 1498. She died before July 1532. They came from fairly well-to-do families, and owned several houses in Haarlem. Jan Mostaert is documented in Haarlem almost every year from 1498 to 1516 and from 1526 to 1552. He died there between April 1552 and April 1553.
According to Van Mander, Mostaert trained with the Haarlem painter Jacob Jansz (who may have been the Master of the Brunswick Diptych). He was already being mentioned as a painter (‘scilder’) in 1498, and in 1502 he is recorded as a member of the local Guild of St Luke, of which he was dean in 1507 and 1543-44. Some pupils (‘leer-junck’) of his are recorded in the guild registers of 1502-07.
There are documented commissions for the wings of a tabernacle altarpiece in the St Bavokerk in Haarlem (1500-05), for the wings of an altarpiece in St Elizabeth’s Hospital (1550), and for the high altarpiece in the church in Hoorn (1549-50). None of those works has survived.
Although Jan Mostaert was appointed a ‘painctre aux honneurs’ in March 1518 by Margaret of Austria (1480-1530), regent of the Netherlands, and presented her with a painting of Philibert de Savoie in January 1521,9 there is no evidence that he was her court painter, so there is no reason to trust Van Mander’s statement that he worked at Margaret’s court in Mechelen for 18 years.
Van Mander also says that Mostaert was the portrait painter of the Dutch nobility, but unfortunately none of the paintings he describes can be securely identified with extant works. The Portrait of Abel van den Coulster in Brussels10 is similar to Van Mander’s description of a self-portrait by Mostaert.
As regards history paintings, the Christ Shown to the People in Moscow,11 which corresponds closely to another painting described by Van Mander, provides a yardstick for the attributions of a few memorial triptychs: the Alckemade Altarpiece with the Last Judgement for the Van Noortwijck family, which can be dated c. 1514, now in Bonn,12 the Altarpiece of the Deposition (the so-called Triptych of Oultremont) in Brussels, commissioned by Albrecht Adriaensz van Adrichem (c. 1470-1555), of c. 1520-25,13 and the pair of shutters of c. 1522-26 (also in Brussels) ordered by the same donor and his third wife.14 The Scene from the Conquest of America, described by Van Mander as unfinished and in the possession of Mostaert’s grandson Nicolaas Suycker, provides a reference point for his later work.15 The reconstruction of Mostaert’s oeuvre begun by Glück in 1896 (prior to which these paintings had been attributed to the Master of the Triptych of Oultremont) and continued by Friedländer, currently numbers some 30 to 40 paintings, including several devotional pieces and about 10 portraits. Friedländer’s attribution of The Tree of Jesse (SK-A-3901) to the young Jan Mostaert, which was adopted by Boon and others, remained controversial in the 20th century. Here it is reattributed to Geertgen tot Sint Jans.
References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 229r-v; Glück 1896; Steinbart in Thieme/Becker XXV, 1931, pp. 189-91; Friedländer X, 1932, pp. 9-32; Thierry de Bye Dólleman 1962; Thierry de Bye Dólleman 1963; Van der Klooster 1964; Duverger 1971; ENP X, 1973, pp. 11-23; Miedema III, 1996, pp. 190-204; Snijder in Turner 1996, XXII, pp. 199-201; Van Thiel-Stroman 2006, pp. 249-53
(Jan Piet Filedt Kok)
Entry
This is the earliest and only individual portrait of a black African to have survived from the late middle ages and the Renaissance. He has a moustache and a forked beard, and his black hair is largely covered by an orange bonnet with a turned-up brim on which there is a gold or silver-gilt pilgrim’s badge of Our Lady of Halle, a town near Brussels that became a place of pilgrimage frequented by the Habsburg rulers of the Low Countries.16 He is wearing a low-cut, deep red doublet and a simple gown over a white shirt. His brown hose is attached to his doublet with double points, the space between them being filled with the white shirt and the codpiece. He is wearing thin white leather gloves, and his right hand rests on the beautifully worked hilt of a sword. The sword itself is held in an embroidered strap with a leather or velvet bag hanging from it which is decorated with pearls and gold thread with inset floral motifs and has a fleur-de-lis worked into it.
The man’s costume was already rather outmoded by the 1520s, with only the short hair and the beard being fashionable at that time. Interestingly, he is not wearing a palrock, a long overgown which would have concealed his hose, the bottom of the white shirt and the codpiece. The fairly simple clothing and the absence of the palrock indicate that the man was not a nobleman but more probably a soldier, while the pilgrim’s badge makes it likely that he was a Christian who moved in the circles around Margaret of Austria (1480-1530) at the Habsburg court in Brussels or Mechelen, or both.17
Taking all these factors into account, the historian Van den Boogaart suggested that the man might be Christophle le More, an archer who was a member of Emperor Charles V’s bodyguard. Christophle’s name crops up repeatedly in documents about the retinue of the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, for the first time as a groom in 1503, and for the last time in 1521, when he was in Aachen as a member of the bodyguard for Charles V’s coronation as emperor.18
The original frame, with the integral panel, was cut from a single oak plank. Although much of the frame was sawn off (there is still a narrow edge around the painted surface), the paint layer is completely intact and the portrait has retained its original dimensions. As far as the type goes, the painting belongs with a number of Flemish portraits of princes and noblemen from the early 16th century. It stands on its own in the group, being the only known portrait of a black individual from this period. Most contemporary depictions of black men in the role of Balthazar in the adoration of the Magi lack individualised features and are fairly stereotype.19
The traditional attribution to Jan Mostaert is confirmed by the similarities in style and technique to portraits and religious works attributed to him.20 He visited the court of regent Margaret of Austria in Mechelen in early 1521, and may have painted this portrait then. Unfortunately, it has been impossible to discover who commissioned it or why. It is nevertheless likely that it was painted between 1525 and 1530.
The man’s facial features appear to have been copied in the first half of the 16th century in a Flemish portrait of St Maurice, the earliest version of which, now in Vienna (fig. a), came from the collection of Archduke Ferdinand in Ambras.21
(Jan Piet Filedt Kok)
Literature
Friedländer 1921, p. 200; Friedländer X, 1932, p. 123, no. 30; Rotterdam 1936, no. 44; Amsterdam 1958, no. 85 (as c. 1525); Winkler 1959, p. 178; ENP X, 1973, p. 72, no. 30; Hackenbroch 1996, pp. 239-45; Van den Boogaart 2005; Filedt Kok/De Winkel 2005; Lowe 2005; Eichberger in Mechelen 2005, pp. 274, 323-24, no. 135; Koldeweij 2006, pp. 47, 54-56; Filedt Kok in Rotterdam 2008a, pp. 176-78, no. 27
Citation
J.P. Filedt Kok, 2010, 'Jan Jansz Mostaert, Portrait of an African Man, Mechelen, c. 1525 - c. 1530', in J.P. Filedt Kok (ed.), Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.431086
(accessed 27 July 2024 03:22:37).