Portrait of a gentleman, seated at a table

This portrait is first recorded in the 1884 Royal Academy exhibition as by Aelbert Cuyp, before appearing in the 1930 collection sale of Henry William Edmund Petty-Fitzmaurice, 6th Marquess of Landsdowne, as the work of Ferdinand Bol (loc. cit.). The painting must have been cleaned at some point before it reappeared at auction fifteen years later, as Jan Victors' signature and the date were revealed at upper right, having previously been hidden under a crest that had been added at a later date. In her 1985 PhD dissertation, Debra Miller recognized this painting among Victors' earliest portraits (loc. cit.). Victors, like Bol, is thought to have trained in the workshop of Rembrandt van Rijn, though there is no documentary evidence to support this. While he started and ended his career painting portraits, in the intervening thirty years he focused on large-scale biblical subjects and everyday scenes. After the mid-1650s Victors abandoned his painting career and became ziekentrooster ('comforter of the sick'), for the Dutch East India Company. He travelled to the East Indies in 1676 and likely spent the rest of his life there.