Portrait of a young man, bust-length, with his head turned to the left

This likeness is one of the earliest known portraits by Hans Baldung Grien, painted at a key juncture in the artist's career, when, after his first major professional successes, he sought to establish himself as the leading painter in Strassburg. One of the great generation of German artists that emerged under the influence and tutelage of Albrecht Drer - with Georg Pencz, the Beham brothers, Hans Schaüfelein, Hans Leu II and, slightly later, Hans von Kulmbach - Baldung came from a very different social background to that of most of his fellow craftsmen, having been born into a well-established family of lawyers, doctors and academics, one of whom (Hieronymus Baldung) was the personal physician of Emperor Maximilian I. Although it is not known who Baldung's first teacher was, by the time he was 18 in 1503 he was sufficiently skilled to enter Dürer's workshop in Nuremburg, and he is believed to have produced one of the great masterpieces of German draughtsmanship and self-portraiture of any school, the celebrated and haunting Self-Portrait on grey-green paper in Basel (Kunstmuseum) just before this, in circa 1502.

It was in Dürer's workshop that the young Baldung earned the nickname Grien ('Green'), presumably out of a preference for this color in his painting. Baldung progressed quickly, becoming one of the most-trusted members of Dürer's studio, to the extent that when Dürer departed on the second of his famous trips to Venice (1505-1507), he left Baldung in charge of the workshop. On Dürer's return, Baldung left Nuremburg for Halle, where he received his first major commissions as an independent master painter. These were the Epiphany or Adoration of the Magi altarpiece (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) and the extremely accomplished Saint Sebastian altarpiece (signed and dated 1507; Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum), both much prized by Cranach's great patron, Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg. The Saint Sebastian altarpiece includes a self-portrait dressed in green which relates closely both to the Basel drawing and to the present work, which would seem to be one of the first pictures Baldung painted upon establishing himself in Strassburg in 1509, where he was to settle, marry, open a workshop and pursue his career.

This portrait was probably painted on Baldung's arrival in Strassburg, and will have been an important move in establishing Baldung's reputation in that city, serving as a demonstration of his skills and as an advertisement for future portrait commissions. It is one of only two portraits dated to the transitional year 1509, the other being the Portrait of a young man with a rosary in the Royal Collection (London, Hampton Court). The sitter in the present portrait, who cannot have been much older than the artist, then in his mid-twenties, is depicted with a delicate attention to the delineation of the features and an evocation of a quiet self-confidence and restrained elegance. The black-on-white lacing of the sitter's doublet is a visual element that appealed to the artist, and recurs in the masterful Portrait of a man in front of a rose hedge in the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the figure of Saint Sebastian in an altar wing in Dessau, Staatliche Galerie, while the treatment of the eyelids recalls that in both of the Halle commissions. The motif of the hat drawn low over one eye appears in the Basel drawing as well as in the Halle self-portrait, which also shares with the present work a three-quarter turn of the head and a feathery treatment of the eyebrows and sideburns; this and other similarities suggest that the possibility that the present picture was also painted as a self-portrait should perhaps be re-examined.