Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait)

Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait)

Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait)

Artist:Willem Drost (Dutch, Amsterdam 1633–1659 Venice)
Date:1653 or 1655
Medium:Oil on canvas
Dimensions:34 1/8 x 28 1/2 in. (86.7 x 72.4 cm)
Classification:Paintings
Credit Line:Given in memory of Felix M. Warburg by his wife and children, 1941

Catalogue Entry

This portrait has long been accepted as the pendant to Drost's Portrait of a Woman (the Painters Fiancée?) (Museum Bredius, The Hague), which is signed and dated "Drost f—/1653." The two canvases first became known in a London sale of 1884; they were separated in the art market after they appeared in a London sale of 1903. When the paintings were exhibited side by side in 1992, it was obvious that they are consistent in execution (although the female portrait is better preserved) and work well as a pair, providing that the woman's portrait is placed to the viewer's left. This departure from the conventional placement of the man to the left—that is, on the woman's right-hand side (or "heraldic right")—usually indicates that the sitters were betrothed rather than married.
The form of the signature on the male portrait and whether there is any evidence of a date have been variously reported (see Refs.). As revealed by Abraham Bredius (1913 and 1929), the cartellino bearing Drost's signature and a date of 1653 or 1655 had been covered over by someone in the art trade in order to sell the painting as a Rembrandt. Removing the overpaint must have caused damage to the inscription. There is enough space for the "Wilhelmus" (the Latin form of Willem) read by Hofstede de Groot (1913), but only a possible period can now be discerned following the much abraded "Wilhelm." Above the artist's name is a decorative flourish that may have been read in the past as a date, but this is doubtful. In the center of the cartellino, which is now nearly void, are the remains of a capital A followed by slight traces of other painted marks. Presumably, “Ao 16??” was once in this area, but disappeared a long time ago. The remains of "Amsterdam.,” with flourishes, are at bottom center.
Bredius, who owned the pendant portrait, proposed in 1929 that the New York painting is a self-portrait by Drost. This identification has fallen out of favor in recent literature, but it deserves to be more closely considered.
First, the young man resembles Drost as he appears in his etched Self-Portrait of the previous year (Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), which could have been made as little as a month or as much as about twenty-three months earlier. The wide-spaced eyes, the arching eyebrows, and the shapes of the nose, mouth, and chin are similar. The hair looks the same, but is cut shorter in the painting, where there is also a small amount of facial hair.
Second, the importance of the cartellino bearing Drost's inscription has been underestimated. The motif is not comparable (as has been claimed) with Rembrandt's monogram on the letter held by Marten Looten in the portrait of 1632 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), where the sitter’s name is far more prominent. The notion of an almost unknown artist making such a conspicuous display of his signature on the formal portrait (or, more unexpectedly, the betrothal portrait) of a person other than himself is implausible, without some special explanation. By contrast, the illusion of a sheet of paper stuck between the surface of the painting and the frame is precisely the sort of device, or demonstration piece, that Netherlandish artists (following their Italian colleagues) employed to draw attention to their skill and their name at the same time. Examples are found in a variety of genres, including still life (by Edwaert Collier and others), marine painting (Jan Porcellis's Stormy Sea, of 1629, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich), and portraiture. The fact that Drost, on this one occasion, signed with his full name and added the place, probably the date, and calligraphic flourishes strongly suggests that the painting is indeed a self-portrait. It should also be noted that the placement of the hand on the chest, while found in portraits of diverse gentlemen (for example, Rembrandt's Marten Looten), is especially common in Dutch and Flemish self-portraits and portraits of fellow artists. The gesture is often meant as a reference to artistic temperament, and has origins mainly in sixteenth-century Venetian painting.
Third, the young woman in the pendant portrait bears a strong resemblance to the model in Drost's Bathsheba with King David’s Letter, of 1654 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), and in his Young Woman in a Brocade Gown (Wallace Collection, London), of about the same date. The long, thin, slightly upturned nose, the high brow, the slim ovoid face, and other features are quite similar. This is not a matter of the artist's having a standard female type, from which he did not vary, even when attempting to capture an individual's appearance. The most likely explanation is that Drost, like Rembrandt, employed his young wife (or companion, in Rembrandt's contemporary pictures) as a convenient model in paintings of Bathsheba and other erotically charged characters.
At present, Drost's possible engagement in 1653 and his marriage in 1653, 1654, or at any other time are not indicated by known documents. It may well be that an Amsterdam record (like that of Drost's baptism) has long been overlooked, or that the painter's presumed fiancée was from another city or town and the marriage took place there (where records may or may not survive). If Drost was married before he went to Italy, his wife probably would have stayed at home; a number of cases are known in which married painters made the expensive and potentially risky trip on their own. For example, about 1642 Jan Baptist Weenix (1621-1660/61) went to Rome, leaving behind his wife and fourteen-month-old son, Jan Weenix, to whom he did not return until about four years later.
It is also possible that Drost's wife died, or that he was never betrothed, in which case The Met's picture would have to be considered as a portrait of an unidentified gentleman.
[2016; adapted from Liedtke 2007]

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