Head of a bearded man wearing a cap

The sitter of the present work also sat for de Gheyn in a drawing now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn, Three Generations, The Hague, 1983, no. 729, pl. 377). The slightly long beard and hair in the present drawing indicate that it was drawn on a different occasion. K.G. Boon suggested that the sitter was a fisherman at Scheveningen and was drawn on a visit to the coast in 1603 (K.G. Boon, Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, The Hague, 1978, under no. 217), although Professor van Regteren Altena pointed out that a fisherman would be unlikely to be so well dressed.