This serene painting depicting a sitter in front of an open window with a landscape beyond reflects a compositional format that emerged in Flemish portraiture in the second half of the fifteenth century. One of Hans Memling’s earliest known works to follow this scheme, this picture dates to about 1470. The window frame separates the sitter from the landscape in the background.
The tower on the right, which may be that of the church of St. Giles, just outside Memling’s hometown of Bruges, may help identify the sitter. The Torreman family had a chapel in this church and also displayed a tower in their coat of arms. The subject may be Jacob Torreman, founder of the chapel, or another member of that family, and the tower in the background may be a reference to their coat of arms; however, this remains conjectural.
Portrait of a Man
The thriving trade centers of the Netherlands provided an international market for talented artists such as Memling. However, the plain coat worn by the subject of this portrait offers no clue to his nationality, occupation, or rank. The serious, firmly modeled head suggests a man who was not only forceful but thoughtful. Although he is physically placed close to the viewer, his body pressed against the frame, he appears aloof and removed from the world. Panels such as this often served as covers or wings for small private altarpieces, but it seems probable that the Frick example, like many others dating from the second half of the fifteenth century, was commissioned as an independent painting.
Memling was one of the most admired portraitists of his day, in Italy as well as in Northern Europe, owing both to his skill in capturing physical likenesses and to his even rarer gift of conveying, as in this portrait, the intellectual and spiritual character of his subjects.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
North Italian collection (?). Matthiesen Gallery, Berlin, by 1929. Baron Joseph van der Elst, 1932. Baroness Allison Roebling van der Elst, Geneva. Frick, 1968.
Source: The Frick Collection: Drawings, Prints & Later Acquisitions. Volume IX. New York: The Frick Collection, 2003.
