Anonymous Portraits: Dutch Seventeenth-Century Tronies

Anonymous Portraits DUTCH SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRONIES

NICHOLAS HALL

Anonymous Portraits

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Anonymous Portraits DUTCH SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY TRONIES

NICHOLAS HALL 17 East 76th Street New York NY 10021

CONTENTS

6

Foreword

Nicholas H. J. Hall

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Making Faces: The Development of the Tronie

in Seventeenth-Century Leiden

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.

33

Catalogue

lievens

lievens and rembrandt

monogrammist i. s.

FOREWORD

Lovers of the Dutch Golden Age have long been fascinated with a distinctive category of paintings known as tronies. Borrowed from the seventeenth-century Dutch usage of the word, tronie describes a type of character study more or less invented in the Dutch city of Leiden four centuries ago. As provocative as calling them Anonymous Portraits may seem, the tronie presents a paradox: the sitters are usually nameless yet we seem to know them personally, so lively and truthful is their depiction. Sometimes they wear exotic costume, furs and jewels, sometimes a beret and a simple jerkin; they may laugh, look surprised or are deep in thought. Their meaning is ambiguous but these paintings seem felt and deeply charged. We think of anonymity and portraiture as antithetical concepts but somehow in the supreme achievements of Rembrandt and his milieu they managed to reconcile them. From the start, tronies struck a nerve in Holland where there was a ready market for such images.

Today, the word tronie in Dutch carries a pejorative connotation: it can mean a ‘grimace’ or a ‘scoundrel.’ Perhaps it was this outsider status that attracted the South African-born artist Marlene Dumas (b. 1965) to the concept, which became the title of a major exhibition of her work in Munich in 2010. But, in a way, the outsider connotation is not so far from the mark. In the 1620s, when many of these works were painted, two great young artists, Rembrandt van Rijn and Jan Lievens, were just embarking on their careers. Without ready funds and just beginning to establish their reputation, they chose their models where they found them: their relatives, old men in rags and their raffish selves. They recorded these sitters with dramatic flair and meticulous precision.

It is with great pleasure that we celebrate our first exhibition at TEFAF Maastricht with the present publication, which features an original essay by Arthur Wheelock, a widely respected scholar 

of Northern European art. Surprisingly, as we came to discover, relatively little scholarship has been produced on tronies. Moreover, it is only in recent years that these pictures have been re-assessed outside the Dutch context, particularly in the sparkling fantasy figures by Fragonard and Tiepolo.

I am grateful to the many people who have contributed to this enterprise, especially the lenders to our exhibition, thanks to whom we found an apt occasion to delve deeper into the subject. It has been a pleasure and honor to work with Arthur Wheelock, whose contribution and intellectual support has been essential. Much appreciation goes to our dedicated team, led by Bayan Talgat whose patience and resilience have been much admired, and unflinchingly supported by Oliver Rordorf. I would like to thank our designer Larry Sunden, with whom I have been working for thirty years.

He has so thoughtfully and reliably put together this catalogue, which has been a rather challenging one. Leaving it to the last but not least, I am indebted to my wife and business partner Yuan Fang, whose infectious enthusiasm and intuitive creativity has shaped a big part of this project. Coincidentally, the very portrait by the Monogrammist I.S. which we are exhibiting had been sitting in her iPhone photo library for many years, taken at the National Gallery, London, when it was on loan years ago.

Nicholas H. J. Hall January 2019

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MAKING FACES Thedevelopment Development of of the Tronie MAKING FACES The

in Seventeenth-Century Leiden the “tronie” in seventeenth-century Leiden

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.

Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.

In the 1620s Jan Lievens (1607–1674) and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) were at the beginning of their careers (figs. 1 and 2). Restless and ambitious, they were not content to follow in the footsteps of their artistic predecessors from their native Leiden, but were determined to set off in new directions. Born just a year apart, the two were friends as well as rivals. They portrayed one another in their works and challenged each other in their innovative painting techniques. Whether or not they shared a studio in the latter half of the 1620s, as has been proposed, Lievens and Rembrandt developed a symbiotic relationship that is reflected in the similar subjects they chose to depict and the related styles of their paintings, drawings and etchings. Some of their early works are so similar that scholars dispute which of the artists created them, as in Head of an Old Man (fig. 3) or the OldWoman in a Headscarf, thought to portray Rembrandt’s mother, in the Royal Collection, London. The two friends continued to respond to each other’s creative endeavors even after they left Leiden in the early 1630s, Lievens for London and Rembrandt for Amsterdam.

Fig. 1 Jan Lievens, Self-Portrait, ca.

1629–30, The Leiden Collection, New York Fig. 2 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait, ca. 1628, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 3 Rembrandt van Rijn or Jan Lievens, Head of an Old Man, ca. 1631, National Gallery of Art, Washington

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Fig. 4 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Artist’s Mother, 1628, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Fig. 5 Jan Lievens, Head of an Old Woman, “Rembrandt’s Mother,” 1629–30, The Leiden Collection, New York Fig. 6 Jan Lievens, Profile Head of an Old Woman, Facing Left, ca. 1625–27, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Lievens and Rembrandt were particularly captivated with the challenge of rendering the human countenance, and, to an extent not seen in other artistic centers including Haarlem, they depicted the faces of those around them in their paintings, drawings and etchings. In these head studies, known as tronies, they not only rendered themselves, but also family members such as Rembrandt’s mother (figs. 4 and 5), friends and working-class people they encountered in and around Leiden (fig. 6), some of whom they dressed imaginatively in exotic costumes from foreign lands (figs. 7 and 8).1 Lievens and Rembrandt painted, drew, and etched tronies from life (“naar het leven”), from memory (“van onthout”) or from the imagination (“uit den gheest”), which helps explain the variations that exist from one head study to another, even when they depict the same sitter. This essay will examine the complex character and importance of tronies for Lievens and Rembrandt during their Leiden years, and how their creative endeavors influenced subsequent artists, specifically Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou and the Monogrammist I.S.2 

Fig. 7 Rembrandt van Rijn, Bust of Old Man with Turban, ca. 1627–28, The Kremer Collection Fig. 8 Jan Lievens, Man with a Turban, ca. 1629, Private Collection

A seventeenth-century Dutch/English dictionary defines tronie as “Visage, Face, or Countenance;” however, the connotations of the term are more varied than this definition would suggest.3 Some documents indicate that tronies could also be half-length or three-quarter length figures. Jan Lievens’ Man in Oriental Costume (“Sultan Soliman”), which the artist painted around 1630 for the Prince of Orange (fig.

9), is one such work. Constantijn Huygens, secretary to the Prince, explicitly described this work as a “painting of a man, purportedly a Turkish ruler, with 

the head of a Dutchman.” The Dutchman who posed for this painting was well known to Lievens, who often portrayed this model in bust-length tronies, for example the head of a bearded man wearing a beret in Vienna (fig. 10). As is characteristic of many of his tronies, Lievens depicted the latter figure slightly larger than life-size and in strict profile.

Many tronies were “character studies,” where artists sought to capture momentary expressions or distinctive moods. Tronies, which were primarily created for the artist’s own use or for sale on the open market, differed from portraits (conterfeytsels in Dutch), which were commissioned works, often for wealthy patrons, scholars or preachers. Distinguishing between tronies and conterfeytsels, however, is not always easy, particularly when the artist’s intent and the circumstances for their creation are not known. This confusion is especially evident when a tronie depicts a known sitter or is executed in a refined manner and portrays a distinguished-looking sitter. The likelihood that such a work is a tronie and not a conterfeysel increases when the same model appears in multiple paintings, drawings or etchings.

Fig. 9 Jan Lievens, Man in Oriental Costume (“Sultan Soliman”), ca. 1625, Stiftung Preussische Schölosser und Garten, Brandenburg

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This question also arises when trying to determine whether Lievens’ and Rembrandt’s self-images from the late 1620s are self-portraits or tronies. For example, in his striking self-portrait from about 1629–30 (see fig. 1), Lievens carefully renders his facial features, but he also shows himself gazing off to the right as

if to emphasize his active and searching mind. Lievens reinforces this emphasis on his personal character through his forward pose and his long, flowing hair, which he paints with strikingly free and spontaneous brushstrokes. Rembrandt’s contemporaneous depiction of himself (see fig. 2) might also be considered a tronie as it showcases Rembrandt’s artistic prowess, not only through the dramatic chiaroscuro that largely shades his face, but also through the scratches in the wet paint that articulate the tight curls of his hair. Both of these paintings feel so alive because each artist captures a moment in time.

Fig. 10 Jan Lievens, Old Man, ca. 1625– 26, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Fig. 11 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Beret, 1630, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

While these self-portraits by Lievens and Rembrandt are both striking in their originality, their pictorial differences also speak to a rivalry that must existed between these two young Leiden masters as they sought to define themselves artistically. They were both ambitious and canny self-promoters who effectively used their self-portraits to bring attention to their distinctive personalities. Lievens’ features are refined, appropriate for someone eager to receive court patronage, whereas Rembrandt’s coarse features, unkempt hair, and the strong chiaroscuro effects that almost entirely obscure his face project a radically innovative

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artistic personality without social aspirations. Rembrandt also emphasized this independent persona in etched selfportraits/tronies that he made for the open market. These images often depict fleeting expressions, whether scowling or smiling (fig. 11), that are entirely different from the solemn and reflective character of traditional self-portraits.4

Fig. 12 Jan Lievens, The Feast of Esther, ca. 1625, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh Fig. 13 Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Israel, 1630, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam ďœąďœś

Lievens’ and Rembrandt’s interest in tronies was intimately connected to their aspirations to be history painters. They wanted to depict stories from the Bible and mythology that dealt with moral and ethical issues fundamental to human life, stories that had inspired writers, poets and artists before them. History painting ranked as the highest echelon in the artistic hierarchy, requiring erudition as well as imagination to portray narratives from the distant past or from classical myths. Much as with Jan Lievens’ dramatic The Feast of Esther, c. 1625 (fig. 12), or Rembrandt’s Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Israel, 1630 (fig. 13) history painting was only successful if an artist could make the narrative come to life by rendering recognizable human emotions through body language, gesture and facial expression. Tronies abetted these efforts because they provided insights into how one should portray people of different ages and physiognomies in compelling and meaningful ways. Nevertheless, while the “character studies” that Lievens and Rembrandt made during the 1620s undoubtedly helped them in their portrayals of figures and facial expressions in their biblical and mythological paintings, these artists rarely replicated their head studies directly in these works. Their fascination with tronies, thus, existed above and beyond the demands of history painting.

Fig. 14 Anthony van Dyck, Head of a Young Man, ca. 1617–18, National Gallery of Art, Washington

The challenges of depicting the human physiognomy in all its variety excited Lievens and Rembrandt and they went back, time and again, to revisit known models and revise drawings and etchings to find new ways of deepening and enriching these images. It did not hurt, of course, that their efforts were greatly admired by collectors and art lovers.5 In this respect, Lievens’ and Rembrandt’s tronies played a far different role in the creative process than did comparable head studies by the Flemish masters, Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens and Anthony van Dyck. As with this expressive head by Van Dyck (possibly a self-image) (fig. 14), Flemish artists almost always created their drawn and painted tronies for specific biblical or mythological scenes.6 It is, however, worth noting that even in 

the seventeenth century there was a strong demand for these Flemish head studies which, as a result, were widely copied and replicated.

The large number of etched tronies that Lievens and Rembrandt made in the late 1620s and early 1630s, indicates that an active market existed for such images even at the lower end of the economic scale among Dutch art collectors. Rembrandt often revised his etched heads in different states, which collectors avidly acquired. Lievens produced two series of etched tronies, each with a title page, that depicted an array of scruffy peasants, lower-class individuals, and even a Moorish woman.7 Although Lievens’ prints were small in scale, they were revolutionary in their strikingly direct and sympathetic rendering of these anonymous people (fig. 15). Lievens’ forthright approach, which reflects his empathy with different social classes and ethnic backgrounds, contrasts fundamentally with literary and pictorial imagery stemming from the tradition of Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

The comic texts of Adriaenszoon Bredero, for example, are filled with descriptions of ill-formed and uncouth peasants behaving badly.8 A similar approach was taken in an important late sixteenthcentury series engraved after designs by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, where the physiognomies of peasants are exaggerated to the point of caricature (fig. 16). A late seventeenth-century reprinting of this series by Claes Jansz Visscher provided each of these peasants with

Fig. 15 Jan Lievens, Bust of a Cook with Cap, 17th century, National Gallery of Art, Washington Fig. 16 After Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Heads of a Peasant Man and Woman, 17th century, engraving, National Gallery of Art, Washington 

a satirical name: the man in this print was called “Aecht WithoutSoul” and the woman “Heectje All-Too-Beautiful.”9

Fig. 17 Jan Lievens, Old Woman Reading, ca. 1621–23, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Although a year younger than Rembrandt, Lievens was the more precocious of the two artists. According to Jan Orlers, a Leiden historian and friend of the Lievens family, both artists studied at an early age with older masters in Leiden before spending some time in Amsterdam with the renowned history painter Pieter Lastman. After Lievens returned to Leiden in 1619 at the age of twelve, he set up a studio in his father’s home. It is probable, given the pronounced influence on his art of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, that he subsequently visited Utrecht.10 After Rembrandt returned to Leiden in 1625, having studied with Lastman for six months, he once again came into close contact with Lievens. The two artists acquired materials, such as panels, from the same sources, responded repeatedly to each other’s creative endeavors and occasionally depicted each other in their paintings. 

The paintings that Lievens created at the beginning of his career “astounded” Orlers and his contemporaries, who were amazed that “a mere stripling of twelve or scarcely older” could paint like he did. Orlers specifically cites a portrait Lievens purportedly made of his mother in 1621, likely the OldWoman Reading (fig. 17).11 In this expressive image of a bespectacled woman with a lined and wrinkled face reading from a leather-bound tome, Lievens captured the time-worn character of the aged sitter������ ’����� s appearance by aggressively modelling her face with thick impasto and unblended strokes of yellow and pink. When painting the ermine-fur cloak he also used his fingers and the blunt end of his brush to scratch into the wet paint.

Although no prototype existed in Leiden or in Amsterdam for such a bold vision, Lievens, as we have proposed, could have found inspiration in Utrecht. There he would have encountered

Fig. 18 Hendrick ter Brugghen, Saint Jerome, ca. 1621, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Fig. 19 Anthony van Dyck, The Apostle Thomas, ca. 1618–20, Private Collection

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paintings by Hendrick ter Brugghen, some of which featured old men with similarly wrinkled brows. One of Ter Brugghen’s figures looks down intensely at an open book (fig. 18), much as does Lievens’ woman.12 In addition to Ter Brugghen’s paintings, Lievens could have seen in a private collection in Utrecht a boldly executed Apostle series

by Anthony van Dyck and his studio. Strikingly, Saint Thomas (fig. 19) is shown reading from a weighty tome in a manner similar to Lievens’ model in OldWoman Reading.13

Fig. 20 Jan Lievens, Bearded Man with a Beret, 1630, National Gallery of Art, Washington

OldWoman Reading is the first of many depictions of elderly people that Lievens and Rembrandt painted, drew, and etched while they were in their teens.14 Both of these artists were fascinated with the faces of the aged, not only for the technical challenge of rendering their wrinkles and creases. While they sometimes depicted the aged as indolent or covetous, they more often portrayed them as 

pious or contemplative. During the course of the 1620s Lievens and Rembrandt continually developed their painting technique in their tronies to reflect an increasingly nuanced interpretation of the character of their aged sitters. Lievens’ Bearded Man with a Beret (fig. 20), for example, is a sympathetic portrayal of an elderly man with expressive eyes and parted lips. Rather than modelling this figure with densely applied, thick paint as he did with his earlier Old Woman Reading, Lievens indicates the transparency of the man’s skin with thinly applied glazes, while suggesting its roughness with impasto applied with quick strokes of the brush. Much like Rembrandt in his Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Israel, 1630, Lievens scratches through the still wet paint with the blunt end of his brush to articulate the hairs in the man’s beard and moustache.15 Fig. 21a Jan Lievens, The Second Oriental Head, 1630–32, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Fig. 21b Rembrandt van Rijn after Jan Lievens, The Second Oriental Head, ca.

1635, National Gallery of Art, Washington 

Once Lievens and Rembrandt moved away from Leiden in the early 1630s they continued to respond to each other’s work and to create tronies that were often exotic in character. In 1635, for example, Rembrandt made free copies of four Oriental Heads that Lievens had etched in Leiden, revising them to make them more outlandish (see figs. 21a and 21b, pp. 38–41; ).16 Rembrandt’s painted tronies were also highly desired on the open market, particularly ones depicting himself, sometimes in fanciful oriental dress. He continued to paint tronies of other sitters in anticipation of figures that would feature in

his history paintings. After he moved to Antwerp from London in the late 1630s, Lievens published a number of etched tronies that he had originally made in Leiden, but he too continued to etch and paint new ones throughout his career.17 During their Leiden years the genius of Lievens and Rembrandt brought the tronie to a new level of significance in Dutch art through their paintings, drawings and etchings. But other artists in their orbit developed their own approach to the genre. Foremost among them was Gerrit Dou, Rembrandt’s first student.

Dou came to study with Rembrandt in 1628, when he was 14 years old, and stayed with him until his departure for Amsterdam in 1632. Although the specifics of his instruction are not known, Rembrandt clearly urged the young apprentice to paint tronies of some of the elderly models that were also sitting for him in the late 1620s.

A favorite model for Dou was an old woman often described as Rembrandt’s mother. Not only did he depict her in a number of tronies, he also featured her in his Old Woman Reading (fig. 22), ca.

1631–32. Nevertheless, despite his use of one of Rembrandt’s most distinctive models, Dou depicts her in a detailed and refined painting technique that differs from the expressive and free brushwork characteristic of Rembrandt’s early tronies. Dou focused on every detail in the woman’s appearance, from the crow’s feet around her eyes to the wrinkles of her hand, and from the nap of her velour mantle to the individual strands of her fur cap and collar. A possible explanation for this painstakingly detailed manner of painting is that by 1628, when Dou came to study with Rembrandt, he had already trained to become a glass engraver and glass painter, his father’s profession, since the age of nine. This craft, which required a meticulous

Fig. 22 Gerrit Dou, Old Woman Reading (Rembrandt’s Mother), ca. 1631–32, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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Fig. 23 Gerrit Dou, Old Man Praying, ca.

1665, The Leiden Collection, New York

technique, undoubtedly had a huge impact on Dou’s refined manner of painting.18 Beyond a demonstration of Dou’s remarkable technique, which he developed and refined throughout the rest of his career, OldWoman Reading reveals that Dou was not only beholden to Rembrandt in the dynamic artistic environment of Leiden. Dou clearly found much to admire in the work of Jan Lievens in his sympathetic characterization of age as well as subject matter and pose. As we have often seen in Lievens’ tronies, Dou renders the woman in strict profile and paints her slightly larger than life-size. Finally, the subject of an elderly woman pouring intently over a book has a striking precedent in Lievens’ own Old Woman Reading (see fig. 17).

Dou’s extraordinarily detailed technique became the hallmark of his style of painting. He continued to paint tronies of elderly men and women long after Rembrandt had left Leiden, which are remarkable for the great sensitivity and refinement in which he rendered their physiognomy and character (fig. 23). Head of the famed Leiden school of fijnschilders (“fine painters”) that flourished throughout the seventeenth century, Dou’s were highly prized and avidly collected by collectors in Leiden and elsewhere. His international reputation, in fact, extended far beyond the Netherlands, and his paintings soon entered the collections at the courts of Queen Christina in Stockholm, Archduke Leopold William of Austria in Vienna, King Charles II of England, and Cosimo III de’ Medici in Florence.

Many artists came to study with Dou or tried to emulate his manner. Some, like Frans van Mieris, were successful while others either lacked the patience or the skill to rise to his high levels of artistic creation. Others emulated Dou’s style and technique even though they may not have actually entered his workshop. One of these was an anonymous master known as the Monogrammist I.S., a mysterious figure whose nationality is unknown.

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Dated paintings by the Monogrammist I.S. range from 1632 to 1658, and these dates, which overlap those of Dou, probably reflect his primary years of activity. This mysterious figure clearly had a keen awareness of Dou’s refined technique, which he sought to emulate in his own works. His known paintings are exclusively tronies and portraits, with his most direct connection to Dou’s work being his head studies. Nevertheless, they differ markedly from Dou’s tronies, and one would never confuse the works of these two masters. Dou painted his head studies with small brushstrokes that are remarkably free and flowing, which give a sense of movement to his figures (see fig.

23). The Monogrammist I.S. rendered his figures with smooth and modulated paints, but, as with Portrait of aWoman, Facing Left (fig. 24), he articulated facial characteristics with firm lines that distinguish one feature from another. In this work, he emphasized the woman’s full lips, broad nose, and expressive eyes, one of which has a growth on the upper lid. The upturned tilt of her head adds an emotional dimension to the image as she seemingly reflects on thoughts passing through her mind. The Monogrammist I.S.’s tronies are particularly compelling in their haunting portrayals of inner strength and human dignity. His sitters, inevitably tight-lipped and severe, gaze ahead

Fig. 24 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left, ca. 1650, Private Collection Fig. 25 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Old Woman, 1651, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

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with purpose and conviction, their faces lined in ways that impart character, not just age (fig. 25).

The tronies discussed in this short essay have a lineage that begins with the extraordinary head studies that Lievens and Rembrandt painted, drew and etched in the late 1620s and early 1630s. In their tronies, the two young Leiden artists challenged themselves and each other to push their pictorial approaches and techniques to create the compelling images of their sitters. The tronies of Gerrit Dou and the Monogrammist I.S. are direct descendants of those works, even though these artists executed theirs with detailed techniques that differ from the expressive brushwork of their Leiden predecessors.

Consistent throughout this continuum, however, is each artist’s respect for the inherent dignity of man. Through their creations we encounter people from all walks of life and levels of society, and are given access to their feelings and emotions. Whether based on reality, from memory or from the imagination, the tronies by these masters resonate with immense power because they plumb truths about the human condition that is both inspiring and uplifting.

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1 In contemporary Dutch the word tronie has a derogatory meaning, and often refers to coarse, unsophisticated individuals. In the seventeenth century, the word also was used with depictions of people of high status. See: Lia van Gemert, “The Stamp of Your Face: Tronies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Literature,” in Dagmar Hirschfelder and Leó Krempel eds., Tronies: Das Gesicht in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2014), 25.

2 For important studies about the history and character of tronies, see: Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2008); and Franziska Gottwald, Das Tronie: Muster—Studie—Meisterwerk; Die Genese einer Gattung der Malerei vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zu Rembrandt (Berlin and Munich, 2011).

3 Jaap van der Veen, “Faces from Life: Tronies and Portraits in Rembrandt’s Painted Oeuvre,” in Albert Blankert, Rembrandt: A Genius and His Impact (Exh cat. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria; Canberra, National Gallery of Australia) (Zwolle, 1997), 69–81.

4 For further discussion of Rembrandt’s self-promotion with his self-portraits, see: Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., “Rembrandt Inventing Himself,” in Alan Chong, ed. Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt: Art and Ambition in Leiden, 1629–1631 (Exh. cat. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) (Zwolle, 2001), 13–24.

5 See Christiaan Vogelaar, “Rembrandt in Leiden: his Town, Workshop and Models,” in Christian Vogelaar and Gerbrandt Korevaar, eds. Rembrandt’s Mother: Myth and Reality (Exh. cat. Leiden, Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal) (Leiden, 2005), 11–31.

6 Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., The Collection of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogues: Flemish Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. Washington, D.C., 2003.

7 For these series, see Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh cat. Washington, National Gallery of Art; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis; Milwaukee Art Museum) (New Haven, 2008), 194–196, nos. 62–66. These series were on their title pages as: “Diverse Tronikens…” and “Variae Effigies…” Lievens etched a number of these heads in Leiden, but then likely added more after he moved to Antwerp in the mid1630s, at which time these series were published.

8 See: Lia van Gemert, “The Stamp of Your Face: Tronies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Literature,” in Dagmar Hirschfelder and Leó Krempel eds., Tronies: Das Gesicht in der Frühen Neuzeit, (Berlin, 2014), 30–33.

9 The series, probably first assembled around 1565, consisted of 36 sheets with 72 paired heads. Visscher republished the series in 1658. See: Henk Nalis, The Van Doetecum Family, in Ger Luijten and Christiaan Schuckman, eds., The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings andWoodcuts, 1450–1700, 3 vols.

(Rotterdam, 1998), 2:148–168, cat. 341–376; and Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2008), 158–163.

10 As suggested by Bernhard Schnackenburg, “Young Rembrandt’s ‘Rough Manner’: A Painting Style and Its Sources,” in The Mystery of theYoung Rembrandt, ed. Ernst van de Wetering and Bernhard Schnackenburg (Exh. cat. Kassel, Museumslandschaft Hessen; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis), 2001,

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100, Rembrandt likely spent some time with Jan Lievens before going to Amsterdam to study with Pieter Lastman in 1624–25.

For an English translation of Orlers’ text, see Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh cat. Washington, National Gallery of Art; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis; Milwaukee Art Museum) (New Haven, 2008), 288. According to Orlers, Jan Lievens apprenticed at the age of 8 with the local portrait and history painter Joris van Schooten where he learned “the principles of both drawing and painting.” In 1617 his father sent him to Amsterdam to study with Pieter Lastman. After two years he returned to Leiden and set up a studio in his family’s home. Orlers wrote that Lievens immediately produced works with such “consummate skill” that connoisseurs were “astounded” and “found it hard to believe that a mere stripling of twelve or scarcely older could produce such work...”

Among these works were two paintings from 1621, Ter Brugghen’s Saint Jerome, Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Calling of Saint Matthew, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, where an elderly man similarly gazes through eye glasses perched at the end of his nose.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Anthony van Dyck (Exh. cat. Washington, National Gallery of Art) (Washington, 1990), 130. A series of Apostles, bust-length in format, executed in Van Dyck’s workshop around 1621, was in a private collection in Utrecht by 1623. See also David DeWitt’s discussion of Lievens’ Saint Paul, c. 1624–25, in Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh. cat. Washington, National Gallery of Art; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam; Milwaukee Art Museum) (New Haven, 2008), 88–89, no. 4.

Anouk Janssen, “The Iconography of Old Age and Rembrandt’s Early Work,” in Christian Vogelaar and Gerbrandt Korevaar, eds. Rembrandt’s Mother: Myth and Reality (Exh. cat. Leiden, Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal) (Leiden, 2005), 53–66.

Lievens’ experiments with his painting technique continued throughout his life as he continually sought to achieve new and different pictorial effects.

Samuel van Hoogstraten, who was Rembrandt’s pupil, wrote in 1678 that “Jan Lievens was thoroughly at home seeking wonders in smeared paints, varnishes, and oils.” See E. Melanie Gifford, “Lievens’ Technique: “Wonders in smeared paint, varnishes, and oils,” in Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh cat. Washington, National Gallery of Art; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis; Milwaukee Art Museum) (New Haven, 2008), 40–54.

It is not clear what Rembrandt’s motivations were for making these revisions, but he signed the Second Oriental Head (fig. 21b) with the inscription “Rembrandt retouched.”

The market for these tronies must have been quite robust for he worked closely in those years with an Antwerp publisher to distribute them to a broad public. He also made woodcuts and painted head studies of elderly men during those years.

Dou was even a member of the Leiden glaziers’ guild from 1625–27.

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JAN LI E V E N S Leiden 1607–1674 Amsterdam

Man with a Turban ca. late 1620s

Oil on panel 76.8 x 59.9 cm. provenance Aristocratic French Collection, since 1800 Private collection, Paris literature B. Schnackenburg, Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the young Rembrandt, Petersberg, Michael Imhof Verlag, 2016 pp. 138ff, 463, no. d15, reproduced, as by Dirck Lievens Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., “Making Faces: The Development of the Tronie in Seventeenth-Century Leiden,” in Anonymous Portraits: Dutch Seventheenth Century Tronies, p. 12, fig. 8, as by Jan Lievens To be included in Dr. Lloyd DeWitt’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné as by Jan Lievens

The reputation of Jan Lievens was for long outshone by that of his great contemporary Rembrandt. Rembrandt was undoubtedly an artist of greater range and feeling. However, in both artists’ Leiden years in the 1620s and early 1630s, Lievens was regarded as a prodigy and more or less Rembrandt’s equal as a propagator of early Dutch realism, expressed in a rather monochrome palette like landscape painters of the time. Lievens was taken up by Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), the powerful secretary to the Prince of Orange, who the artist recorded in a well-known portrait of 1628–9 today on loan to the Rijksmuseum.1 In 1632 Lievens left for London where he adopted the more international style of the newly installed van Dyck. This served him well at the time but led to the eclipse of his reputation in later generations.

The Man with a Turban differs from Rembrandt in showing a more specific influence of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, notably Honthorst and Baburen, in the man’s powerful physical presence emphasized by strong chiaroscuro. The impact of Rubens, whose work he 

Fig. 1 Jan Lievens, Man with a Turban (detail), ca. 1629, Private Collection Fig. 2 Jan Lievens, Boy in a Cape and Turban, ca. 1629, The Leiden Collection, New York

would have known at the Stadtholder’s court at The Hague, is also felt in the richness and variety of the brushwork. The handling reflects the energy and speed with which Lievens worked and his technical sophistication. The flesh and the turban are laid on with thick impasto, building up the colors. For the beard he uses a thin application of dark brown, but then drags the handle of the brush through the wet paint in the opposite direction to the brushstrokes to uncover a lighter ground and create a pattern of whiskers that catch the light. This is a technique common to many of his paintings in this period, for example the Bearded Man with a Beret in the National Gallery, Washington2 (see page 21, fig. 20 ).

Lievens treats the flesh around the eyes with equal vigor but with shorter strokes in different directions that chart the complex web of folds and wrinkles (pp. 8–9). The artist’s creative energy and virtuosity at this time was praised by Huygens who wrote “compared with his age, the production of the illustrious youth is immense. Seeing the maker beside his paintings, it is scarcely credible that such a meagre sapling can put forth so much fruit.

In painting the human countenance, he wreaks miracles.”3 This Man in a Turban has been assigned by Schnackenburg to Dirck 

Lievens4, the younger brother of Jan, on the basis of a documentary reference to an unidentified painted profile ‘portrait of a Persian’

by Dirck recorded in the Orlers collection.5 However, Arthur Wheelock,6 Lloyd de Witt,7 Gregor Weber,8 Jonathan Bikker and Taco Dibbits9 all support the traditional attribution to Jan Lievens. Wheelock and Weber date this panel to the late 1620s, a dating supported by recent dendrochronological testing.10 De Witt will include this picture in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné on Jan Lievens. He considers the present work to be a “strong and dynamic example of a Jan Lievens tronie” and typical of his technique around 1630.Wheelock believes that the scale and the accentuated profile format of this panel are characteristic of works of Jan Lievens painted in the late 1620s.

Fig. 3 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Head of a Philosopher, ca. 1758–64, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Fig. 4 Jan Lievens, Man with a Turban (pre-restoration), ca. 1629, Private Collection

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The Man in the Turban falls into the category of the tronie, a type of subject developed in the 17th century showing imaginary individuals, painted from life, often with striking physical features and exotic dress such as the Boy in a Cape and Turban (fig. 2). Both Rembrandt and Lievens painted numerous tronies at this time and sometimes used the same model. The oriental tronie in this case is a type which grew out of representations of the Adoration of the Magi. Subsequently, ‘orientals’ were used as stand-ins for any exotic figure in history or religious painting, but it was only in these early works by Rembrandt and Lievens that the depiction of single figures in exotic eastern garb led to a specific genre in Dutch painting. In the seventeenth century, ‘orientals’ were a popular subject since the Turks still remained a menace to western Europe until and beyond their defeat

by Sobieski at the gates of Vienna in 1683. In the eigteenth century single oriental figures were a common feature in the works of the Tiepolo

family in Venice (fig. 3), a city that had strong historic trading links with the Middle East.

The present painting has a provenance going back to France circa 1800 as is evident from an old pre-restoration photograph (fig. 4) showing it in its former empire frame. In the previous century, French painters like Jean Barbault and Jean Baptiste Le Prince, among others, made a specialty of single eastern figures both Arab and Chinese, an interest fueled by enlightenment interest in exotic climes and later sustained by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, when his armies were accompanied by a horde of savants. The greatest continuator of the single-figure tronie however was Fragonard whose celebrated series of Fantasy Figures, also dramatized likenesses of real people, was recently exhibited at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. One of them, a Bust of an Old ManWearing a Cap, shows the strong influence of Rembrandt (fig. 5).

Fig. 5 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Bust of an Old Man Wearing a Cap, ca. 1760, Musée JacquemartAndré, Paris

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For a full discussion of Jan Lievens see A. K. Wheelock Jr. et al, exhibition catalogue Jan Lievens : A Dutch Master Rediscovered, New Haven and London, 2009, pp. 1–27, 40–53 2 Jan Lievens, Bearded Man with a Beret, ca. 1630, oil on panel, overall: 53.5 x 46.3 cm., 2006.172.1, Gift of George M. and Linda H. Kaufman. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 3 L. de Witt, “Constantijn Huygens on Lievens and Rembrandt”, in A. K. Wheelock, Jr. et al, Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 287 4 B. Schnackenburg, Jan Lievens Friend and Rival of theYoung Rembrandt, Petersberg, Michael Imhof Verlag, 2016 pp. 138, 463, reproduced d15 5 A Persian tronie as by Dirck Lievens listed in the Jan Orlers collection “Inde Bovencamer: een Persiaenshce Tronye naert leven van Dirc Lievensz” (‘In the upper room; a Persian tronie [done] after life by Dirck Lievens’) Ibid, p. 463 6 Email correspondance with Arthur Wheelock (12/12/2018) 7 Email correspondance with Lloyd DeWitt (1/8/2019) 8 Email correspondance with Gregor Weber (1/7/2019)” 9 Email correspondance with Taco Dibbits (6/6/11) 10 Dendrochronological analysis performed by Prof. Dr. Peter of Universität Hamburg supports a dating to the late 1620s.

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J A N L I EVE N S

Leiden 1607–1674 Amsterdam

Bust of a Young Man, Facing Right ca. 1631

Etching 148 x 128 mm.

Bartsch 26; Hollstein 44 fourth (final) state Signed lower left I Livens, with the publisher’s address at top left Franciscus vanden Wijngaerde ex[udit’ watermark Small countermark (indecipherable) provenance Franz Gawet, Vienna (Lugt 1070 with the date [1]839) Thomas Graf, Berlin (Lugt 1092a) Private collection, USA

A very fine impression of the final state in good, untreated condition; thread margins all round.

REMBRANDT HARMENSZ. VAN RIJN Leiden 1606–1669 Amsterdam

The Fourth Oriental Head ca. 1635

Etching 166 x 144 mm.

Bartsch 289, White/Boon second state (of three); Hind 134; The New Hollstein 152 third state (of six) Monogrammed in the plate at center left Rt watermark Foolscap with seven-pointed collar (Hinterding, vol. 2, p. 139; vol. 3, pp. 252f. ill.) provenance Pietro Giuseppe and Francesco Santo Vallardi, Milan (Lugt 2478) Sale, Klipstein & Kornfeld, Berne, June 8, 1961, lot 108 Craddock & Barnard, London Private collection, USA

A fine, rare impression of the third state, showing subtle tone along the edges of the plate; with margins all round. 

Rembrandt’s etching belongs to a group of four prints traditionally known as The Oriental Heads, all of them to various degrees free copies made in or around 1635 after prints by Jan Lievens. The two artists had worked in close vicinity with each other until Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam in 1632. Lievens was actually the first to take up etching, probably as early as 1625—whereas Rembrandt’s first experiments in printmaking date only from the second half of 1628.

Three of Rembrandt’s Oriental Heads reinterpret prints from the seven tronies that Lievens etched around 1631. This print, the socalled Fourth Oriental Head, is copied (in reverse) after an unrelated print made by Lievens at the same time. For many years scholars accepted the hypothesis, put forward by Carel Vosmaer in his 1868 monograph on the artist, that all four of Rembrandt’s Oriental Heads had been executed by a pupil and then worked on by Rembrandt himself; however as Erik Hinterding notes, “no difference between the styles of pupil and master can be discerned in the prints, and nowadays the heads are considered to be all Rembrandt’s own work” (Hinterding, Lugt Collection, vol. 1, p. 523, no. 213).

While Rembrandt, without referring to Lievens, indicated on three of these plates that the image had been “geretuckeered,” which, as Hinterding infers, can mean it was either retouched or improved (ibid.), the Fourth Oriental Head does not appear to have received either treatment. Rembrandt’s print copies Lievens’ etching in reverse and at the same time introduces some notable differences.

The dress and the hat follow the model extremely faithfully but Rembrandt changes the face, making it more expressive and thereby suggesting an overall more distinctive personality. The puffy cheeks of Lievens’s subject are masked by a moustache and beard.

The eyes are also significantly altered: the sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes of Lievens’s sitter had now become the melancholy gaze of a rather handsome young man. By combining closely copied elements with clearly recognizable changes, Rembrandt manages to show—one might even say—show-off his own artistic talent against that of his Leiden colleague.

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Actual size

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Actual size

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M ON OG R A M M I ST I . S. Active 1632–1658

Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left Oil on canvas laid onto panel 34 x 27 cm. provenance Private collection, Madrid London, Sotheby’s, 8 December 2010, Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale, lot 5 Private collection, London exhibited On loan to National Gallery, London, 2011–2018 related literature Th. Von Frimmel, “Von Monogrammisten IS” in Blatten für Gemäldekunde, 1904, pp. 132–133.

Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, vol. IV, Landau-Pfalz, 1983, p. 2548 ff.

This so far anonymous genre painter was first studied in an essay by Theodor von Frimmel in 1904 and has more recently been discussed in greater detail by Werner Sumowski.1 He is known as the Monogrammist I.S. on the basis of works clearly by the same hand signed enigmatically “I.S.” So far, the name of no plausible artist with these initials has come to light. It has been suggested that the painter was of German rather than Dutch origin, and on the basis of the costume in some of the paintings that he worked on. In central Europe, many artists were peripatetic but whether these ideas are indeed sustainable remains open. What is clear is that the painter looked closely at the Leiden school, especially the early work of Rembrandt (fig. 1), Lievens and Gerard Dou around 1630 (see page 23, fig. 222). Like the Monogrammist I.S., Rembrandt engaged in the tradition of painting imaginary figures from eastern Europe.3 The Monogrammist’s few known paintings range in date from 1632 to 1658. The closest example to the present work is an old woman in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, formerly signed and dated 1651 (fig. 2). Both pictures may be classified as tronies, a 

clockwise from top right Fig. 1 Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Woman Praying (Rembrandt’s Mother), ca. 1629–30, Residenzgalerie, Salzburg Fig. 3 Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Head of a Levantine, 18th century, Morgan Library & Museum, New York Fig. 4 Giuseppe Nogari, An Elderly Woman in a Stripped Shawl, ca. 1740–43, National Gallery of Art, Washington Fig. 5 Christian Seybold, Old Woman with a Green Headscarf, ca. 1695–68, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

genre developed in the Netherlands chiefly in the first half of the seventeenth century where anonymous sitters, apparently based on live models, are presented as examples of various physical types, striking in physiognomy and dress. In many respects they anticipate the capriccio heads by Piazzetta (fig. 3) and the Tiepolo family 

Fig. 2 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Old Woman, 1651?, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna ďœ´ďœˇ

in late baroque and rococo Venice. In the Vienna painting the obsessive cartography of the sitter’s headdress and wrinkled skin also looks forward to the more showy and picturesque head studies of the eighteenth-century German artists Balthasar Denner and Christian Seybold, or the Venetian Giuseppe Nogari (figs. 4 and 5).

The Monogrammist I.S.’s portraits are more formal in appearance. Nevertheless, like his tronies, they also have a fascinating visual power (fig. 6). They are similarly detailed with pictorial elements carefully defined and separated one from another. His portraits generally depict distinguished scholars and religious figures posed near a table with a still life containing scholarly accoutrements such as books, and vanitas elements such as skulls, favorite subjects of Leiden still-life artists (fig. 7). Aside from Dou’s tronies, he also was aware of another important aspect of Leiden painting: Vanitas still lifes.9

Fig 6. Monogrammist I.S., Man with a Growth on his Nose, ca. 1645, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm Fig. 7 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Unknown Man, ca. 1651, Private Collection 

The Monogrammist I.S. clearly appealed to discriminating collectors at an early period.

The OldWoman and the Man with a Growth on his Nose both in the National Museum, Stockholm, are first recorded as belonging to Johan Gabriel Stenbock in 1705. Stenbock was Swedish and made a brilliant career at court and in the civil service. He invested his fortune with Dutch bankers and owned other paintings by Rembrandt and his school. Subsequently both pictures by the Monogrammist I.S. passed into the Sparre and Tessin collections, among the best known in 18th-century Sweden. The OldWoman in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, is first recorded as no 736 in the celebrated collection of the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1647–56.

The present work shows a middle-aged subject younger than in the Vienna painting and is psychologically more original in the woman’s dispassionate gaze, as if stoically accepting whatever life has to offer. Indeed, there are few paintings in Dutch art which display such uncompromising detachment. Another related tronie is an old woman in a cloak with fur collar in the National Museum, Stockholm (fig. 8)5 which has a clinical objectivity that recalls Georges de La Tour.4

Fig. 8 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Old Lady, ca. 1645, oil on panel, Nationalmuseum Stockholm

1 W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, vol. IV, Landau-Pfalz, 1983, p.

2548 ff 2 Gerrit Dou, OldWoman Reading (Portrait of Rembrandt’s Mother), c. 1631–32, oil on panel, 71.2 x 55.2 cm, A.H. Hoekwater Bequest, The Hague, SK-A-2627.

3 For example, Rembrant van Rijn, The Polish Rider, ca. 1655, The Frick Collection, New York 4 Still lifes with scholarly or Vanitas elements were a specialty of Leiden artists in the 1620s, 1630s and 1640s, particularly for masters such as Jan Davidez de Heem, David Bailly, and Harmen Steenwijck.

5 Referenced on W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, vol. IV, LandauPfalz, 1983, p. 2555 

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Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. is the Senior Advisor to the Leiden Collection.

He was most recently the curator of Northern Baroque painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. During his tenure from 1975 to 2018, Wheelock oversaw a significant expansion of the Gallery’s collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings and organized a number of major exhibitions, including Anthony van Dyck (1990), Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits (2005), Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (2008) and most recently Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry (2017). Besides holding a professorship at the University of Maryland, Wheelock has lectured widely on Dutch and Flemish art and has written many articles and books, among them Vermeer and the Art of Painting (1995), and the catalogues of the National Gallery’s Dutch (1995) and Flemish (2005) paintings. His revised and expanded Dutch catalogue, which was published online in 2014, received the George Wittenborn Book Award as the best art publication in the United States for that year.

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NICHOLAS HALL

Established in 2016, Nicholas Hall is an appointment-only gallery on the Upper East Side of New York. The gallery deals in museum-quality works

by European artists from the 13th to mid-20th century and provides bespoke advisory services for the discerning collector. Before founding his eponymous gallery, Nicholas was the International Chairman of the Old Master and Nineteenth-Century Departments at Christie’s. His first gallery, Hall & Knight Ltd., was acquired by Christie’s in 2004.

Selected Museums with works of art acquired through Nicholas Hall Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Centre Pompidou, Paris Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit The Frick Collection, New York J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth Louvre Museum, Paris Meadows Museum, Dallas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa National Gallery, London Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

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Selected Publications by Nicholas Hall 2019 2018 2018 2017 2002 2001 2000 1992

Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art Nemesis: Titian's Fatal Women Metamorphosis: Liu Dan’s Fantastic Landscape and the Renaissance Paintings by Carlo Maratti Procaccini in America A Taste for Italian Art in Holland Fearful Symmetry: George Stubbs: Painter of the English Enlightenment Colnaghi in America: Old Masters in a New World

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MAKING FACES Fig. 1 Jan Lievens, Self-Portrait, ca. 1629–30, oil on panel, 42 x 37 cm., The Leiden Collection, New York, JL-105. Image courtesy of The Leiden Collection, New York.

Fig. 2 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self Portrait, ca. 1628, oil on panel, 22.6 x 18.7 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-4691. Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt, the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum and the ministerie van CRM. Image: Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 3 Rembrandt van Rijn or Jan Lievens, Head of an Old Man, ca. 1631, red chalk, with touches of black chalk, on laid paper, 13.7 x 13.8 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1987.20.11a. Gift of Mrs. Lessing J. Rosenwald. Image: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 4 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Artist’s Mother, 1628, etching on paper, 63 x 64 mm., Mr. and Mrs. De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-1961-1195. Image: Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Art, Washington, D.C., 2006.172.1. Image: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 21a Jan Lievens, The Second Oriental Head, 1630–32, etching on paper, 164 x 144 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-OB 12.557. Image: Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 21b Rembrandt van Rijn after Jan Lievens, The Second Oriental Head, ca.

1635, etching on paper, 151 x 125 mm., Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1950.1.116. Image: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 22 Gerrit Dou, Old Woman Reading (Rembrandt’s Mother), ca. 1631–32, oil on panel, 71.2 x 55.5 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-2627.

Image: Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 23 Gerrit Dou, Old Man Praying, ca. 1665, oil on panel, 18 x 12.7 cm., The Leiden Collection, New York, GD-107. Image courtesy of The Leiden Collection, New York.

Fig. 24 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left, ca. 1650, oil on panel, 34 x 27 cm., Private Collection.

Fig. 5 Jan Lievens, Head of an Old Woman “Rembrandt’s Mother”, ca. 1629–30, red and black chalk on yellow-hued, buff-colored laid paper, 108 x 85 mm., The Leiden Collection, New York, JL-103. Image courtesy of The Leiden Collection, New York.

Fig. 25 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Old Woman, 1651, oil on panel, 41 x 33 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Gemäldegalerie, 419. Image: Courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Fig. 6 Jan Lievens, Profile Head of an Old Woman, Facing Left, ca. 1625–74, etching on paper, 146 x 122 mm., RP-P-OB-12.575, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Image: Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 1 Jan Lievens, Man with a Turban (detail), ca. 1629, oil on panel, 76.8 x 59.9 cm., Private Collection.

Fig. 7 Rembrandt van Rijn, Bust of Old Man with Turban, ca. 1627/28, oil on panel, 26.5 x 20 cm., The Kremer Collection © Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 8 Jan Lievens, Man with a Turban, ca. 1629, oil on panel, 76.8 x 59.9 cm., Private Collection.

Fig. 9 Jan Lievens, Man in Oriental Costume (“Sultan Soliman”), ca. 1625, oil on panel, 135 x 100.5 cm., Sanssouci collection, Stiftung Preussische Schölosser und Garten, Brandenburg. Image: Courtesy Stiftung Preussische Scholosser und Garten, Brandenburg.

Fig. 10 Jan Lievens, Old Man, ca. 1625–26, oil on panel, 67 x 61 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Gemäldegalerie, 741. Image: Courtesy Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Fig. 11 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Beret, 1630, etching on paper, 50 x 45 mm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam RP-P-OB-697. Image: Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 12 Jan Lievens, The Feast of Esther, ca. 1625, oil on canvas, 130.8 x 163.8 cm., North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina, 52.9.55. Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina © Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 13 Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Israel, 1630, oil on panel, 58 x 46 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam SK-A-3276.

Purchased with the support of private collectors, the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum.

Image: Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Fig. 14 Anthony van Dyck, Head of a Young Man, ca. 1617/1618, oil on paper on panel, 51.2 x 41.4 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1953.3.2. Image: Courtesy National Gallery, Washington, D.C. Fig. 15 Jan Lievens, Bust of a Cook with Cap, 17th century, etching on paper, 7.7 x 6.1 cm Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980.45.2291. Image: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 16 After Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Heads of a Peasant Man and Woman, 17th century, engraving on paper, 30.5 x 21.8 cm., Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1964.8.401. Image: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 17 Jan Lievens, Old Woman Reading, ca. 1621–23, oil on panel, 71.4 x 67.3 cm., Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, Cat. 487. Image: Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.

Fig. 18 Hendrick ter Brugghen, Saint Jerome, ca. 1621, oil on canvas, 125.5 x 102 cm., Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, 1977.2. Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund © Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 19 Anthony van Dyck, The Apostle Thomas, ca. 1618–20, oil on panel, 62.2 x 49.5 cm., Private Collection. Image: Courtesy Sotheby’s, New York.

Fig. 20 Jan Lievens, Bearded Man with a Beret, 1630, oil on panel, 53.5 x 46.3 cm., Gift of George M. and Linda H. Kaufman, National Gallery of

JAN LIEVENS

Fig. 2 Jan Lievens, Boy in a Cape and Turban, ca. 1629, oil on panel, 66.7 x 58.1 cm., The Leiden Collection, New York, JL-104. Image courtesy of The Leiden Collection, New York.

Fig. 3 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Head of a Philosopher, ca. 1758–764, oil on canvas, 60.5 x 45.8 cm., Gift of Mrs. Richard E. Danielson and Mrs. Chauncey McCormick, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 1945.175.

Image: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 4 Jan Lievens, Man with a Turban (pre-restoration), ca. 1629, oil on panel, 76.8 x 59.9 cm., Private Collection.

Fig. 5 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Bust of an Old Man Wearing a Cap, ca. 1760, oil on canvas, 54 x 43.5 cm., Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. Image : Josse/Scala/Art Resource, NY MONOGRAMMIST I. S. Fig. 1 Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Woman Praying (Rembrandt’s Mother), ca.

1629–30, oil on copper, 15.5 x 12.2 cm., Residenzgalerie, Salzburg, Inv. Nr.549. Illustrations: Fotostudio Ulrich Ghezzi, Oberalm.

Fig. 2 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Old Woman, 1651, oil on panel, 41 x 33 cm., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Gemäldegalerie, 419. Image: Courtesy Kunsthisto risches Museum, Vienna.

Fig. 3 Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Head of a Levantine, 18th century, black chalk, heightened with white chalk, on light brown paper made up at left edge, 38.4 x 30 cm., Gift of János Scholz, Morgan Library & Museum, New York, 1974.26. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

Fig. 4 Giuseppe Nogari, An Elderly Woman in a Stripped Shawl, ca. 1740–43, pastel and watercolor on two joined sheets of blue paper, mounted on white paper and on original strainer, 51.5 x 40.5 cm., Alisa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1984.69.1. Image: Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 5 Christian Seybold, Old woman with a Green Headscarf, ca. 1695–1768, oil on copper, 41.5 x 32.5 cm., Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Gal.-Nr. 2095. Image: bpk Bildagentur / Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden / Elke Estel / Hans-Peter Klut / Art Resource, NY. Fig. 6 Monogrammist I.S., Man with a Growth on his Nose, ca. 1645, oil on oak, 48 x 37 cm., Transferred 1865 Kongl. Museum, Nationalmuseum Stockholm, NM 645. Photo: Public domain / Nationalmuseum.

Fig. 7 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Unknown Man, ca. 1651, 63.5 x 52.1 cm., Private Collection. Image: Courtesy RKD – Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis.

Fig. 8 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Old Lady, ca. 1645, oil on panel, 46 x 39 cm., Transferred 1865 Kongl. Museum, Nationalmuseum Stockholm, NM 646. Photo: Cecilia Heisser/Nationalmuseum.

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NICHOLAS HALL

17 East 76th Street New York NY 10021 +1 212 772 9100 nicholashjhall.com Monday to Friday 10 am – 5 pm Selected weekends By appointment only

© 2019 Nicholas Hall and Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. isbn: 978-1-7326492-3-1 All rights reserved

detail, page 2 Monnogrammist I. S , Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left, oil on canvas laid onto panel, 34 x 27 cm.

No part of this catalogue may reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except for the purpose of research or private study, or criticism and review.

detail, page 8 Jan Lievens, Man with a Turban, ca. late 1620s, oil on panel, 76.8 x 59.5 cm.

Design: Lawrence Sunden, Inc. Printing: The Studley Press

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map detail Johannes Willemszoon Blaeu, Plattegrond van Leiden, 1652, print on paper, 42.3 x 54.3 cm., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, RP-P-AO-10-11-1. Image: Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.