Attributed to Sir Anthony van Dyck

(Antwerp 1599-1641 Blackfriars)

Portrait of a man in profile facing to the right, in a white ruff, black tunic and gold chain,

Footnotes

Provenance
The Collection of Jules Strauss
With Thos Agnew's, London, 1968, where purchased by the present owner in 1997

Exhibited
Yokohama, Sogo Museum of Art, Anthony van Dyck, August-September 1990, cat. no. 5 (as van Dyck, circa 1617-19)
Shizuoka, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Anthony van Dyck, October- November 1990, cat. no. 5 (as van Dyck, circa 1617-19)
Osaka, Museum of Art, Kintetsu, Anthony van Dyck, November-December 1990, cat. no. 5 (as van Dyck, circa 1617-19)
London, Kenwood House, Clerics and Connoisseurs: An Irish Art Collection through three centuries, 19 October 2001- 27 January 2002, cat. no. 77


Literature
E. Larsen, L'Opera completa di Van Dyck, 2 vols., Milan 1980, no. A22 (not by van Dyck)
E. Larsen, The Paintings of Anthony van Dyck, Freren, 1988, vol. II, p. 418, no. A16 (not by van Dyck), ill.
(ed) Anthony van Dyck, exh. cat., Japan, 1990, cat. no. 5
(ed) A Laing and N. Turner, Clerics and Connoisseurs: An Irish Art Collection through three centuries, London, 2001, exh. cat., pp. 281-2, cat. no. 77, ill.

When in the collection of Jules Strauss the attribution of the present work to van Dyck was rejected by Larsen, who suggested that it might be by another master, such as Jan Boeckhorst. Subsequent research, however has drawn attention to its closeness in both style and format, to a series of portrait sketches of civic dignitaries, shown bust length in feigned oval stonework frames, which van Dyck painted around 1630 in order to prepare a group portrait of the 1627/8 Brussels city council, which unfortunately was destroyed in 1695 during the French bombardment of Brussels, although Horst Vey has made a reconstruction of its design from the known sources ('Van Dyck's Two Lost Group Portraits for the Brussels Town Hall', Van Dyck, 1599-1999: Conjectures and Refutations, ed. by H. Vlieghe, pp. 65-75). Vey further surmised that a series of portraits of dignitaries in feigned oval frames, painted in a 'strikingly spontaneous manner', with none of the sitters 'looking at the viewer', were made from life as modelli for this group portrait. The known sketches comprise, among others, two portraits in the collection of Mrs Cartwright-Hignett of Iford Manor, Wiltshire, one of which shows the sitter in profile to the right; another in the Methuen Collection, Corsham Court, Wiltshire; and a fourth in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. According to Sir Oliver Millar another painting from the series was formerly in the collection of the Earl of Ancaster at Grimsthorpe Castle and in an oral observation to the owner in 2001 Sir Oliver also pointed out that the present work is part of the series, albeit that it is larger and painted on canvas rather than panel (and it was not subsequently included in the 2004 monograph which he co-authored).

The connection of the present portrait with the series of portraits of magistrates is further endorsed by the old inscription which includes the designation of the sitter's office as 'shepen' or magistrate. The inscription also indicates that the sitter's name may have been A. R. Shut, or Schutt and the word 'schepen' is preceded by the number '4', suggesting that it was part of a sequence. The gold chain about the sitter's neck is most likely his badge of office.