Solid cast. Extensively finished.
Alloy tin bronze with some lead; copper with low impurities (Cu 95.28%; Zn 0.49%; Sn 2.09%; Pb 1.59%; Sb 0.32%; As 0.12%; Fe 0.08%; Ni 0.14%; Ag 0.14%).

…; from the dealer Brimo de Laroussilhe, Paris, Ffrs 20,000, to the museum, 1967

Object number: BK-1953-17

This bronze figure of a man, with goatee and upright forelock, is elegantly dressed in a doublet with epaulettes long puffed breeches and a large neck ruff. A wide mantle with a flat collar drapes down over his left upper arm and wraps around the waist. His stockings are held up with bow-tied ribbons. The tilted angle of his plumed, cone-shaped hat gives the man a dandy-like appearance. Based on the style of his attire, the bronze can be dated to the second quarter of the seventeenth century.

The man’s walking pose, together with the mounting hole discernible in the base, suggest the figure originally belonged to an automaton. In that case, it would have been mounted on some kind of secondary base that rotated or moved back and forth. As a consequence of this motion, the missing object held in the left hand may quite conceivably have come into contact with a small bell. One example of an automaton with moving figures mounted on circulating discs is the horologist Isaac Habrecht’s Strasbourg Clock (1598), today preserved in the British Museum.¹¹D. Thompson, Clocks, London, 2004, pp. 48-51. Cf. also Hans Schlottheim Trompetterautomat, Kümmel 1996 (original ed. Augsburg, 1582), fig. 36. Like the figures on this carillon clock, the Amsterdam bronze has no internal mechanism of its own, for example, to make the arms move, as is frequently the case with marionettes on more complicated automatons (cf. BK-16083).

Automatons were typically manufactured by clockmakers, known for their ingenuity in devising instruments with moving parts. During the sixteenth century, the clockmaker’s profession evolved so quickly in the imperial cities of southern Germany, and especially Augsburg, that by 1550, they had far surpassed the competition elsewhere. This success likely partly explains why automaton production became an industry chiefly centred in that region.

If in fact the present Man in Fashionable Dress was originally made for an automaton, the most probable origin is Southern Germany. This is contrary to the Southern Netherlandish provenance posited by past authors, an erroneous conclusion obviously based on the genre-like subject, which indeed brings to mind such elegant figures found in paintings and prints by Willem Buytewech (c. 1592-1624) and other genre painters from the Low Countries at this time.²²H.R. Weihrauch, Europäische Bronzestatuetten, 15.-18. Jahrhundert, Braunschweig 1967, p. 366.

Frits Scholten, 2024

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 241, with earlier literature

F. Scholten, 2024, 'anonymous, Man in Fashionable Dress, Southern Germany, c. 1625 - c. 1650', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20035654