Frans Pourbus the Younger, 'Portrait of an Unknown Man, aged 56', 1591

The identity of the man in this extraordinarily powerful and realistic portrait has not yet been determined, although two Latin inscriptions provide some clues. In the upper corners, we can read that the portrait was painted ‘in the year of the Lord 1591’ (‘AN[NO] D[OMI]NI 1591’), when the sitter was ‘in his 56th year’ (‘AETATIS SUAE 56’). A third, smaller inscription beneath the sitter’s age declares it to be made by ‘Frans Pourbus the Younger, son of Frans the Elder’ (‘F[RANS]. POURBUS FIL[IUS] FR[ANS] FECIT’). In 1591 Pourbus lived in Antwerp, working largely for the noble and merchant classes, to which the sitter must have belonged. Trained in a family of successful Flemish painters, Pourbus’s outstanding technical proficiency in portraiture would soon bring him to the attention of many illustrious patrons abroad, and led to him travelling across Europe from Mantua to Naples and Paris.

The fine lines on the sitter’s forehead, the papery skin around his eyes, the slightly furrowed brow and the dark circles beneath his eyes capture his advancing age. A once rich head of red hair is now grey and cropped short, but there are still wisps of ginger tones in his wiry beard and moustache. Pourbus delighted in the slightly unruly quality of both, rendering every whisker and hair with great delicacy and energy.

The sitter wears a doublet trimmed with soft brown fur, black quilted satin sleeves and a delicate ruff which matches his cuffs. Ruffs were highly fashionable items of clothing and denoted wealth and status. He holds a soft kid leather glove in his right hand and stands in front of a table covered in a green cloth, against a plain background. His expression is arresting, and he engages the viewer with a direct gaze. The upright pose with a hand placed on a hip is one often reserved for aristocracy or royalty, thus ennobling our sitter. The viewpoint is high, so the sitter’s figure would have looked even more imposing when the portrait was hung high on a wall in his comfortable and spacious house.

There are no obvious clues to the sitter’s profession, but he is clearly a man of some standing. A glove can sometimes denote a betrothal, but considering the man’s age, it would seem more likely to be a symbol of wealth. The pendant Portrait of a Woman Aged 54 (Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco) shows his wife in an equally sophisticated dress with similar attention to detail. The two paintings once hung together in the Schloss Weissenstein (Pommersfelden, Germany) and belonged to the impressive collection of Lothar Franz von Schönborn, Archbishop-Elector of Mainz. When the paintings were sold (and separated) in 1867, the noted art historian Théophile Thoré-Bürger described this portrait as ‘a masterpiece of truth and expression’. At the same sale, Thoré-Bürger would eventually buy Johannes Vermeer’s Young Woman seated at a Virginal.