Portrait of a gentleman, bust-length

Barent Fabritius was the younger brother of the well-known and short-lived Rembrandt pupil, Carel Fabritius, to whom this portrait was long attributed following a misreading of the signature. Christopher Brown (loc. cit.) was the first scholar to question the attribution to Carel, proposing instead an attribution to the little-known Amsterdam painter Gerbrand Ban, who did at times produce similarly conceived small-scale portraits in oval, including the Portrait of a young man of 1650 in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. However, in his seminal multi-volume work on paintings by Rembrandt pupils, Werner Sumowski correctly suggested the name of Barent Fabritius (loc. cit.), an idea to which Rudi Ekkart was equally sympathetic nearly a decade later (loc. cit.). As such, it constitutes a rare portrait within Barent’s oeuvre.

When the painting appeared at auction in the 1970s, it was noted that X-rays revealed that Barent reused an earlier panel on which an entirely different portrait had been painted (see Christie's, London, 30 November 1973, lot 67, unsold). On account of the sitter’s dress, that portrait likely pre-dated 1640.