English: Description in Flemish paintings C. 1600-C. 1800 III, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2010, cat.no. 205:

Technical notes: The painting’s support is a thin copper plate, less than ±1 mm thick, cut into an oval shape with slightly irregular edges. The verso of the plate shows signs of its manufacture in the form of circular marks made by a planishing hammer and fine striations from polishing with a steel brush. No coppersmith’s mark is present; the verso is marked with an incised “X” at the bottom centre.

The support was prepared with an extreme.Ty thin, brush-applied, white ground that probably contains some chalk (calcium carbonate), after the surface of the plate had first been roughened to provide better adhesion between the support and the ground/paint layers. Small protrusions occur throughout this white ground layer. Paint is applied very thinly in the greenish grey background, in the sitter’s hair and dark grey costume, more thickly in the brilliant white lights in the face and costume, the white lace collar, and the yellowish flesh tones of the illuminated areas of the face, with much admixture of lead white and with orange-red accents in the ruddy cheeks. The sitter’s face and body were applied over a light greenish grey underpaint, and the facial features then outlined in brown using a very fine brush. As a result of the non-absorbency of the support and the thinness of the ground layer ridges of excess paint have formed on the surface at the boundaries between thinly and more thickly painted areas of colour. The brushwork is quite sketchy, loose and free, considering the smallscale format, for example, in the white lace collar, the flesh tones and the individual strands of hair. The painting is in excellent condition, with scattered small losses of the paint and ground layers mainly confined to the edges and the background, and only a few pinprick losses in the sitter’s face and costume. A layer of old varnish, only slightly discoloured, is present.

Provenance: (Julius Böhler, Munich, by 1968). Acquired through purchase in 1968. The unidentified middle-aged male sitter of this bustlength miniature portrait is depicted in nearly frontal view before a neutral dark grey-green background, turned very slightly towards the right. Light illuminates the forehead and left side of his face. He has long, centre-parted dark brown hair, a moustache and tuft on the chin. He wears a black doublet over a white chemise with a small, flat collar bordered with lace and tied with a tasselled cord. The sitter’s hair style and costume are those worn by officials at the Brussels court of the Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.1 On the basis of costume the portrait can be dated c. 1650.

Among the rare portraits painted by Teniers, the present painting, which is unsigned, may be compared, by virtue of its style and fine execution, with the small-scale, half-length portrait of an elderly woman painted around ten years earlier, c. 1640, now in Paris (Institut Néerlandais, Fondation Custodia, Coll. F. Lugt).2 The serious, introverted expression of both sitters is typical of the artist’s work. The painting is truly like an easel painting in miniature, the brushwork being surprisingly loose and free for this small format. Miniature portrait painting in oils on metal was practiced in the Netherlands in the 17th century, notably in the northern provinces, but also by Flemish artists including Gonzales Coques, who was employed by the Dutch Stadtholder Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, at The Hague.3 Teniers occasionally chose a copper support for small-scale portraits, for example, his signed bust-length Portrait of a Young Man in Brunswick (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum).4 Very small format portraits in oils such as the present picture were seldom painted by artists who confined themselves to this genre. Indeed, there is no record of any Netherlandish painter having devoted himself exclusively to miniature portraiture in oils. Yet it seems that from time to time many easel painters, accustomed to working in large, allowed themselves to be persuaded, either by friends or by patrons, to work in a small format. Occasionally there were commissions for small-scale replicas of large portraits: in the collections of the House of Orange-Nassau at The Hague there exists a bust-length miniature portrait in oils of the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, earlier attributed to Teniers I and painted c. 1652 after the artist’s full-length portrait of the same date in Vienna (House of Orange-Nassau Historic Collections Trust).5 The portable miniature portrait, originally associated, in the 16th century, with the various royal courts of Europe, was of course pre-eminently suitable for keeping alive the memory of a person for reasons of diplomacy or affection. CF 1 As seen in a series of pictures by David Teniers II of the early 1650s depicting the Archducal picture gallery, of which there are examples at Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, and at Petworth House, The National Trust, both dated 1651; see Antwerp 1991, fig. 13, and cat. no. 76, illus.; London 2006/2007, fig. 2, and cat. no. 2, illus. 2 Oil on wood, 19.5 x 15.0 cm, signed, Paris, Institut Néerlandais, Fondation Custodia, Coll. F. Lugt, inv. no. 6530B; see Antwerp 1991, cat. no. 19B, illus. (M. Klinge). 3 See K. Schaffer-Bodenhausen and M. Tiethoff-Spliethoff, The Portrait Miniatures in the Collections of the House of Orange-Nassau, Zwolle 1993, pp. 29–34. 4 Oil on copper, oval, 13.0 x 10.0 cm, Brunswick, Herzog Anton-Ulrich- Museum, inv. no. 136; see Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig. Verzeichnis der Gemälde, 1969, p. 565. Over a quarter of Teniers’ surviving works are painted on copper, and it may be noted that he used small-scale oval copper plates of almost exactly the same dimensions as NMB 1951 for a set depicting The Five Senses in Zurich, David Koetser Gallery; see New York and Maastricht 1982, no. 54. 5 Oil on copper, oval, 7.3 x 5.7 cm, Vienna, House of Orange-Nassau Historic Collections Trust, inv. no. m53; see Schaffers-Bodenhausen and Tiethoff-Spliethoff 1993, no. 157, illus., as Southern Netherlands School. Cf. the full-scale portrait in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; see London

2006, .[End]