English: Description in Flemish paintings C. 1600-C. 1800 III, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, 2010, cat.no. 57:

Technical notes: The painting’s original support is a single piece of medium-weight, plain weave fabric. The painting has been lined and mounted on a non-original stretcher. The tacking edges of the original fabric have been cropped, but pronounced cusping present on four sides indicates that the painting approximates to its original dimensions.

Paint was applied thinly in opaque layers over a thick, white ground, with slight impastos in the pinkish white flesh tones and the highlights on the forehead, along the bridge of the nose, in the eyes and lower lip and the white collar. The collar shows slight contour adjustments made during the painting process.

The painting is generally in good condition. A thick layer of discoloured old varnish is present. Abrasion is moderate overall. Abrasion and small losses of paint and ground layers occur at the upper and the lower right corners, along the right and bottom edges. A tendency towards flaking is noticeable in an area at centre right. There are two large retouches in the young man’s face, on the left side of his chin and his left cheekbone, as well as scattered smaller retouches in the clothes and the background. The more thickly painted areas of the face and collar, containing lead white, display a prominent craquelure. The painting underwent conservation treatment in 1926 and 1989.

Provenance: Gift from Edvard Björkman, Paris, through The Friends of the NM in 1926.

Bibliography: NM Cat. 1958, p. 230 (as anonymous Dutch master); NM Cat. 1990, p. 90 (as attributed to Jan Cossiers).

The Nationalmuseum’s catalogue for 1958 lists this male portrait as the work of an anonymous Dutch master, while the 1990 catalogue attributes it to Jan Cossiers. Not enough portraits by Cossiers have survived to allow a definite attribution. His genre scenes are better known and Cossiers was represented earlier in Sweden in the Österby collection by The Fortune Teller, a very popular work with his contemporaries of which many examples were produced.2 There are certain similarities between the male figure in this work and the Nationalmuseum’s portrait. More convincing support for the attribution may be found in a male portrait in Dunkirk.3 The slightly turned up nose in this and other studies of faces is characteristic of Cossiers. There are portraits of a similar kind in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldessammlung in Munich4 and the museum in Valenciennes.5 Finally there is a signed portrait in Antwerp that closely matches this one.6 GCB

1 Among Cossier’s drawn portraits are a series of portrait sketches of his children, some of them in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. 2 See G. Cavalli-Björkman, “Three Netherlandish paintings in the Österby Collection”, Nationalmuseum Bulletin, vol. 5, no. 3, Stockholm 1981, pp. 120–123. 3 Exhibited in the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe 1961, no. 25. 4 No. 231, 135 x 200. 5 112 x 169, S. Linnik, 1975, illus.

6 Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum, Cat. 1948, no. 39.[End]