Portrait of a gentleman holding a letter, full-length, seated with a sword beside a draped table with a globe, candlestick, inkwell, books and letter

This painting, whose authorship was unknown until a 1979 cleaning which revealed the signature, is a particularly fine example of Bartholomeus Breenbergh’s approach to portraiture. In his catalogue raisonné of Breenbergh’s work, Marcel Roethlisberger described the painting as an ‘exquisitely painted, small work’ (loc. cit.), while Nicolette Sluijter-Seijffert in a subsequent entry on the artist for the Grove Dictionary of Art Online designated it a work of ‘high artistic value’. Roethlisberger catalogued only half-a-dozen extant or documented portraits by the artist and noted that this painting has the distinction of being ‘Breenbergh’s only single portrait showing the entire figure’ (loc. cit.; for the other portraits, see Roethlisberger, op. cit., nos. 169, 201, 202, 202a, 207, 208).

On account of the objects included on the desk and the thin sword leaning against the inside of the man’s left thigh, Roethlisberger concluded that the unidentified sitter may be a statesman, a militiaman or a merchant (loc. cit.). There is a subtle theatricality to the image, as the sitter turns, evidently interrupted from his task, to face the painting’s viewer with the penetrating glance of a man fully in control of the situation. Such small-scale, full-length portraits of seated figures within neutral interiors are rare – Roethlisberger notes that they are not to be found in the work of either Frans Hals or Rembrandt and only appear about four times in that of Gerard ter Borch in Deventer, coincidentally the city of Breenbergh’s birth, more than two decades later (loc. cit.). Close artistic parallels can, however, be found in the meticulously rendered portraits of artists like Thomas de Keyser in Amsterdam, where Breenbergh settled permanently in 1633. Much like this portrait, paintings like de Keyser’s Portrait of Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk (1627; The National Gallery, London) and A Musician and his Daughter (1629; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) depict their sitters full-length, actively moving in their chairs and surrounded by objects that refer to their wide-ranging interests and pursuits.