Portrait of a man, bust-length, in a red, fur-trimmed coat and black fur hat

Lippi initially studied with Matteo Rosselli, who recognised his precocious talent for what Baldinucci called his 'sola imitazione del vero' (F. Baldinucci, Notizie dei Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in qua, V, Florence, 1847, p. 262). By about 1630, the year in which he registered in the Accademia del Disegno, and certainly by 1639, the year of Lippi's first known signed and dated work, The Martyrdom of Saint Andrew in San Frediano, he began to establish himself as the master of unvarnished realism, paralleled only in the contemporary work of Giovanni Martinelli.

The sitter for the present picture would appear to be the same model used for the figure of Jacob in Lippi's Jacob and Rachel at the
well, now in the Palazzo Pitti, which Chiara d'Afflito dates to the first half of the 1640s (Lorenzo Lippi, Florence, 2002, p. 224, no. 53).

We are grateful to Dr. Francesca Baldassari for proposing the attribution on the basis of photographs.