Portrait of a gentleman, half-length, wearing a brocaded doublet, before a red velvet curtain

This painting dates to the late 1640s, at the height of Jacob Adriaensz. Backer’s career. Only a few years earlier the artist was commissioned to paint Officers and men of the Company of captain Cornelis de Graeff and lieutenant Hendrick Lauwrensz. for the great hall at Kloveniersdoelen, for which Rembrandt supplied The Nightwatch as a pendant. He initially trained as a painter in Amsterdam before moving to Leeuwarden in 1626/7 to study in the workshop of the history painter Lambert Jacobsz. alongside Govaert Flinck. By 1633 he had returned to Amsterdam and won the commission for the group portrait The Governesses of the Civic Orphanage of Amsterdam, now in the Amsterdam Museum. While Backer never studied under Rembrandt, he was nevertheless influenced by his work through his close association with artists like Govaert Flinck, with whom Backer relocated to Amsterdam in 1633 and who himself became a pupil of Rembrandt. Unlike Flinck, Backer never fell completely under Rembrandt’s spell, instead he adopted a lighter, more spontaneous approach to portraiture, which seems to have been inspired by Flemish artists such as Cornelis de Vos.

Although only a handful of Backer’s portraits are dated, it is possible to construct a chronology on stylistic grounds. From the early 1630s to the turn of the decade he used a sober palette, emphasizing dark colors, mostly browns, greys, and blacks. Along with a muted palette, works from this early period are recognizable by the rather static poses of the sitters, as seen in his masterful portrait of Abraham Velters (fig. 1), dating to circa 1640. The decorative gold thread embroidery on the shoulder of Vilters’s cape, and his partially revealed linen and lace trimmed falling band reveal his high standing as a successful merchant and Amsterdam burgomaster. While the identity of the present sitter is unknown, his clothes reveal his high social standing. His doublet and sleeves are constructed from cloth-of-silver, usually a type of silk or linen, in which some of the weft threads have been replaced with silver threads. The fabric is further enriched with brocaded gold acanthus leaf patterns and decorative gold trim.

At the time this portrait was completed, circa 1647, Backer was receiving many commissions from the Amsterdam governors and working for the court of Frederick Henry, Stadtholder of the Netherlands. He began making use of more vibrant colors and enlivening his sitters with increasingly dynamic poses, as he has done here, with the sitter removing his gloves and gesturing towards his hat on the balustrade. Jaap van der Veen suggested that the direction of the gesture and the continuation of the balustrade to the right, indicates the portrait may have once been part of a pair, although a pendant for this portrait has yet to be identified (loc. cit.). If such a pendant did exist, it may have depicted the sitter’s wife, as a glove was often used as a symbol of marriage.