PIETER VERELST | Portrait of a young man, half-length, wearing a cap with a feather and a gold chain

Private collection, Vienna, circa 1930;

Anonymous sale, Vienna, Dorotheum, 9 March 1993, lot 95, where acquired.

W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau 1983, vol. VI, pp. 3745 and 4076, cat. no. 2457, reproduced;

H.-J. Raupp (ed.), Niederländische Malerei des. 17. Jahrhunderts der SØR Rusche-Sammlung, vol. I, Portraits, Münster/Hamburg/London 1995, pp. 142-45, cat. no. 54, reproduced in colour;

D. Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhundert

s, doctoral diss., Berlin 2008, cat. no. 527, reproduced plate 109;

Pijbes, M. Aarts, M. J. Bok et al, At Home in the Golden Age, exh. cat., Zwolle 2008, p. 122, cat. no. 130, reproduced in colour.

Liesborn, Museum Abtei Liesborn, on loan;

Rotterdam, Kunsthal, At Home in the Golden Age, 9 February – 18 May 2008, no. 130.

The SØR Rusche Collection has been exhibited extensively over the last two decades. Please click here for further information.

This portrait by Verelst, a pupil of the Leiden painter Gerrit Dou, owes much to the early portraits of Rembrandt, such as his Self-Portrait, Age 23, of 1629, today in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.¹ Rather than a straight portrait, however, the present painting is more probably a 'tronie' - a genre more or less invented by Rembrandt, a kind of character study somewhere between portraiture and history painting. 

1 https://www.gardnermuseum.org/experience/collection/10955