Portrait of a gentleman, half-length, in a black cloak

This impressive Portrait of a gentleman testifies to the consummate skill of one of the most exceptional female painters of the seventeenth century — Michaelina Wautier — an artist whose oeuvre has only recently begun to receive the attention it so rightly deserves. Though Wautier turned her brush to all genres, including history painting and still life, it is in her portraits and genre scenes that the artist's lively freshness and observational accuracy find their fullest expression. Her powerful depictions invite comparisons with some of the most outstanding seventeenth-century painters, including Anthony van Dyck, to whom the present work was previously misattributed. Indeed, the infrequent references to Michaelina in subsequent centuries note her particular talent as a portrait painter. The nineteenth-century German art historian Georg Kasper Nagler, for example, wrote that she ‘made herself known…through portraits’ (Neues Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, XXII, Munich, 1852, p. 101). As far as can be discerned from the historical record, the production of portraits formed an integral part of Wautier’s activity as an artist from the beginning of her career, with her earliest identifiable work being the Portrait of Andrea Cantelmo, known today exclusively through a 1643 engraving by Paulus Pontius, and her first extant signed and dated painting, the Portrait of a Commander in the Spanish Army from 1646 (Brussels, Les Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts).

The present painting showcases Wautier’s remarkable talent for capturing the personality of her sitters and can be dated to the latter 1650s, when the artist showed evident engagement with the works of van Dyck and Rubens. Our sitter’s introspective gaze, directed away from the viewer, imbues him with a noble dignity, despite his status remaining elusive. With his mane of auburn hair and pose against the horizon of a cloud-filled sky, the portrait also finds semblance in a work by Michaelina’s elder brother Charles: the Portrait of a man of 1656 (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium; fig. 1), similar in both composition and pensive tenor. Yet, as Katlijne van der Stighelen has noted, they could not have been painted by the same artist, finding the present sitter’s heroic expression and pose very typical of Michaelina, together with the handling of the physiognomy and the costume (after first-hand inspection; private communication, September 2004).

Wautier lavished evident attention on rendering the nuances of the sitter’s skin and features with exceptionally free brushwork, with the versatile handling of paint speaking to a wide range of influences on her practice. Nothing specific is known about her training. Newly discovered archival documents show that she was born and baptised in Mons in 1604; as an unmarried woman, it is likely that she remained there to care for her parents, at least until her mother’s death in 1638. There is evidence of her being active as a painter in Brussels from circa 1640 onwards, an opportunity that was open to her thanks to her brother, Charles, who was then living and working in the town. However, given the lack of contemporary documentary sources, Wautier’s works provide the only clues regarding her artistic training. While she may well have obtained some degree of tutoring training from her brother, it is clear that she equally drew eclectically from sources as disparate as sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian paintings and Michael Sweerts, who had set up a drawing academy in Brussels in 1656 following his return from Rome. Indeed, echoes can be found in the present portrait of Sweerts's Self-Portrait of circa 1656 (Oberlin, Allen Memorial Art Museum). By this time, Michaelina must have already established herself as one of Brussels' leading painters: the 1659 inventory of the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who, as Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, was resident in Brussels between 1647 and 1656, includes four paintings by the artist (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), the only works by a female painter included in this illustrious collection.

We are grateful to Professor Katlijne Van der Stighelen for her assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.