Head of a Young Boy, c. 1650

Head of a Young Boy engages the viewer through the directness of the young sitter’s intense and serious gaze. Light glistening off the boy’s flowing locks and eyes and off his lace collar, tassel, and white shirt activates the image and gives it a striking immediacy unexpected in such a small painting. The copper support, along with the portrait’s oval shape, smooth application of paint, and deep dark green background color, recalls early seventeenth-century Dutch, English, and French miniatures. The young boy’s head does not project a shadow; this stylistic feature is characteristic of such portraits and may relate to the origin of painted miniatures in goldsmith work.[1]  [1]
See Torben Holck Colding, Aspects of Miniature Painting: Its Origins and Development (Copenhagen, 1953), 88; and Joaneath Spicer in conjunction with Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Small Northern European Portraits from the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore (Washington, DC, 2000).

The attribution of miniatures is often difficult, and caution must be exercised when considering the authorship of this work, which has traditionally been identified as a painting by Jan de Bray.[2]  [2]
See Joaneath Spicer with Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Small Northern European Portraits from the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore (Washington, DC, 2000), exhibition brochure no 36. The boy, whose identity is unknown, seems to be about six to eight years old.[3]  [3]
He appears to be about the same age as the sitter in Jan de Bray, Portrait of a Boy Aged Six, 1654, Royal Portrait Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague. See Ben Broos and Ariane van Suchtelen, eds., Portraits in the Mauritshuis,1430–1790 (Zwolle, 2004), 57, no. 8. The style of his neatly coiffed shoulder-length hair, lace collar, and fashionable brown doublet, which has been left unbuttoned in its lower part to leave the shirt exposed, can be dated between 1650 and 1655.[4]  [4]
See, for example, Johannes Verspronck, Portrait of André de Villepontoux (1616–1663), 1651, in Ben Broos and Ariane van Suchtelen, eds., Portraits in the Mauritshuis, 1430–1790 (Zwolle, 2004), 316, no. 948. De Bray did make a number of similar bust-length portraits of young boys during the 1650s and 1660s that are equally sympathetic and direct in their characterization of the sitter, and it is largely for this reason that this painting has been attributed to him.[5]  [5]
The earliest such paintings are pendants of a brother (Portrait of a Boy Aged Seven, 1650, formerly in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, current whereabouts unknown) and sister (Portrait of a Girl Aged Five, 1650, Národni galerie v Praze, Prague). See Joachim Wolfgang Von Moltke, “Salomon de Bray,” in Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft (Marburg, 1938/1939), 11–12, 482, no. 165, and 483, no. 170. None of these other portraits, however, is as small or refined as this one; furthermore, whereas in this painting the shoulders seem too small to support the size of the boy’s head, De Bray’s figures usually tend to have a greater sense of three-dimensionality [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Jan de Bray, Head of a Boy, c. 1655-–1665, oil on copper, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Acquired by Henry Walters 37.270.  De Bray often made bust-length depictions of young boys as elements within family portrait series, and regardless of whether this work was painted by him, it too may originally have been part of a series of images of children from a Dutch family.

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

April 24, 2014

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