Portrait of a gentleman, bust-length, a landscape beyond

Anton Woensam was born in Worms and trained as an artist under his father, Jaspar Woensam the Elder. Like his father, Anton worked for most of his life in Cologne, where he was extremely productive as a maker of woodcuts for book publishers. Woensam also painted panels for church commissions, most notably decorations for the Carthusian monastery of St. Barbara, such as his Christ on the Cross with Carthusian Saints (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne), and an altarpiece for the Church of St. Gereon, parts of which can now be found in the Klerikalmuseum, Freising, and the Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Stylistically, he drew inspiration from Albrecht Dürer and the Nuremberg School as well as the local aesthetic of Barthel Bruyn the Elder, yet his paintings also show an awareness of Antwerp Mannerism. Woensam also was active as a portrait painter, though only three monogrammed and dated portraits by him are known, and only two of these have been located, his Portrait of a 42-year old man from 1523 (LVR-Landesmuseum, Bonn, inv. no. 54.2) and the ex-Goudstikker Portrait of a man of 1524 (sold Christie's, New York, 16 June 2022, lot 4). The third painting, a Portrait of a 24-year old man, is monogramed and dated on the frame and was last seen at an auction of Carola van Ham, Cologne (20-23 October 1971, lot 1522). However, many more portraits of donors are included within his altarpieces, and several other independent portraits are attributed to him.

As Peter van den Brink has observed, in addition to its resemblance to the portrait in Bonn, the present work is even closer to two other portraits: a Portrait of a bearded man in three-quarter profile, before a window ledge that was formerly in the Richard von Kühlmann collection (known from a photograph in the Friedländer archived in the RKD in The Hague), and a Portrait of a bearded man wearing a turban, before a wooden landscape that was last seen in a private collection in Sweden (also known from a photograph in the Friedländer archived in the RKD in The Hague). Like the present work, both paintings display a similar naturalistic handling of their sitters’ facial features. It is possible that the present portrait was once complemented by an integrated frame, which would have extended the trompe l'oeil effect of the sitter's hand resting along the lower edge of the panel. Van den Brink has also observed that the specificity of the sitter's hat helps to date this small panel to circa 1527, as a similar hat appears in a dated portrait of Marten Imhoff, Alderman of Cologne, formerly attributed to Barthel Bruyn (see Sotheby's, London, 4 December 2008, lot 108).

We are grateful to Peter van den Brink for kindly sharing his research on this painting and for endorsing the attribution on the basis of firsthand inspection (Private communication, December 2025).