Portrait of a Man

Entry

The canvas support of this painting is glue-lined. The tacking edge has been laid out at the top and bottom, and cut away at the sides. The apex of the cusping is thus only evident up to approx. 1 cm from the top and bottom. The ground is probably of a white colour; the imprimatura layer may be yellow. What might be dead colouring can be detected in the face and hand. De Poorter believes a millstone ruff may have been overpainted beneath the chin, neck and hair in which case the collar and black costume nearby would be later.¹⁴

Anthony van Dyck’s authorship of this portrait has been generally accepted, and there is no reason to doubt that he executed the face and hand. The status of the black of the cloak is less certain and cannot be determined until cleaning has taken place, especially if a large millstone collar has been suppressed beneath the chin, neck and hair at a later date, as De Poorter surmises. If she is correct, the head and shoulders would have looked like that in the bust-length portrait in the Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels.¹⁵ Dated by Glück¹⁶ and more hesitantly by Schaeffer¹⁷ to Van Dyck’s second Antwerp period (c. 1627-1632/1634), Müller Hofstede¹⁸ convincingly placed it in the first (c. 1613-1620), dating it around 1619-20, in which he is followed, with some qualification, by De Poorter. A convincing chronology of Van Dyck’s oeuvre during his first Antwerp period has not been established; the present portrait is quite distinct and so removed from the handling of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), an early paramount influence, that it is indeed likely to have been executed towards the end of the first phase of his career.

The identity of the sitter is uncertain. Smith identified him as Jan Baptist Franck on the basis of the inscription; this has been followed by the museum (as Jan Baptista Franck). Van der Hoop believed that it might have been intended to refer to a ‘G. Franck’, director of the Antwerp Academy in 1634.¹⁹ The source for this misinformation was Descamps;²⁰ the institution was founded in 1663.

There have been several attempts at attaching a biography to the person with the name and age given in the inscription. The existence of an artist so named is to a degree substantiated by an entry – Jan Baptista Francq. – in the index of De Bie’s Het gulden cabinet of 1662; the reference is to a page where, confusingly, only Gabriel [Francq.] and ‘Den Ionghen Franck’ are discussed, following mention of Sebastian Franck [i.e. Vrancx] on the previous page.²¹ It is curious that the name occurs in the accounts of the estate of the widow of the sculptor Hans van Mildert (1588-1638), Elizabeth Waeyens, who died on 13 March 1657. The official guild accounts of 7 November 1659 itemize a mortuary debt settled with Jan Baptista Franck, ‘deken van de gulde van Sinte-Lucas’.²² However, the dean for the year of death, 1657-58, was ‘Francisco’ Franck, that is Frans Francken III (1607-1667; for a biography of whom see e.g. BK-NM-4190).²³

Descamps in his Lives, published in 1754, allocated a separate entry to Jan Baptist Franck, to whom he believed many paintings by the Franck[en] family were attributed in the hope of enhancing their value, as he was considered to be of superior merit.²⁴ Several paintings (one signed Den j. [jonghe] ffranck) are described as by Jan Baptist Francken in Hoet’s published series of eighteenth-century, Netherlandish auction sale catalogues,²⁵ and two apparently signed paintings are recorded in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Mulhouse.²⁶

However, no artist of this name is recorded in the lists of the Antwerp guild of Saint Luke; and were Jan Baptist Franck to be an alias for either one of the two artists called ‘den jonghen’ Frans Francken, it has to be said that neither of them was a thirty-two-year-old about 1620, the likely date of execution of the present picture. And in spite of the efforts of Müller Hofstede,²⁷ Härting²⁸ has concluded that the existence of an artist with this name, at least active in Antwerp, is unlikely (in spite of which one such is mentioned in the recent account of the Francken family of artists in the relevant 2004 volume of Saur’s Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon). In fact, De Poorter was unable to propose any identification. The sitter, of course, need not have been an artist, although such a prominent mantle as worn here (of which how much is original is unclear) seems to have been favoured by artists who sat to Van Dyck about this time and a decade or so later.²⁹

Very few of Van Dyck’s portraits were inscribed by the artist with the sitter’s name; none is extant that dates from this period of his activity. The inscription on the present picture (described by De Poorter as exceptional) is actually a later addition, very likely added after lining and on top of overpaint. Questions then arise as to when this took place, and whether the inscription was an invention or repeated an earlier (authentic?) inscription on the reverse of the original canvas.

It is impossible to say at this stage whether the lining and introduction of the present inscription took place before the portrait was acquired by Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840) – allowing sufficient time for the writing to be obscured by discolouring varnish, for it was then believed that the sitter was Rubens – or after his disposal of it and before Smith’s publication of the sitter’s identity in 1831.

Gregory Martin, 2022