Head of a man in a feathered cap, in profile to the left

Although he was born and died in Rotterdam, Buytewech is generally associated with the younger artists of the Haarlem School such as Esias van de Velde and Hercules Seeghers, with whom he joined the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke in 1612, and with Esias' younger brother Jan who engraved many of his compositions. In Haarlem Buytewech absorbed the influence of an older generation of artists such as Hendrick Goltzius and Jacob Matham. The present drawing shows this clearly in its elaborate, fantastical character. Described by Egbert Havercamp Begemann as pseudo-portretten, drawings of this set are derived from the prints of 16th Century artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Lucas van Leiden, seen through the prism of Haarlem Mannerists such as Goltzius. The costume recalls particularly the exuberant headgear and slashed doublets of the swaggering landsknechts found in the prints and drawings of Dürer's circle. Buytewech returned to Rotterdam in 1617, the year of Goltzius' death, and died suddenly in 1624, only seven days after writing his will.

The attribution of this drawing, bought as by an unknown Dutch artist, was first suggested to Paul Oppé by Professor I.Q. van Regteren Altena. Buytewech's surviving corpus of about 125 drawings, the vast majority in public collections, was first mapped out by Egbert Havercamp Begemann in 1959, and that catalogue remains the standard work. Havercamp Begemann notes that a drawing of Ruins with the homecoming of Tobias bears the same entwined monogram as this sheet (E. Havercamp Begemann, op. cit., no. 104).