Portrait of a man, bust-length

This drawing and the one in the following lot belong to a series of drawings in black chalk on blue paper which were originally part of a sketchbook. Van Regteren Altena published the group in 1972 and suggested that the sitters were Spanish and that the drawings were executed by ter Borch when he was in Spain in the late 1630s (van Regteren Altena, op. cit., pp. 260-3). However, in her book on the drawings from the studio estate of the ter Borch family, Alison McNeil Kettering noted that only one portrait could be identified as a Spanish sitter (McNeil Kettering, op. cit., p. 138, no. GJr 72 and Appendix I, p. 826, no. 24). According to her the other sitters, among them those in the present drawing and the following lot, are most likely to be Dutch, or at least from northern Europe, probably executed in the late 1640s. Although the drawings might have served as preparatory studies for paintings, no connections have been found so far. It should be noted, however, that the head in the present drawing is very close in posture to a figure with red hair in the back left of The Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, a painting executed by ter Borch in 1648 now in the National Gallery, London.