Head of a youth

This diminutive portrait of a boy wearing an extravagant costume, including a bejewelled velvet hat with a long feather, belongs to the genre known in Dutch as tronies, or physiognomic studies. Tronies were generally used as exercises by artists anxious to practise various techniques of painting, including the rendering of difficult textures and surfaces. Gerrit Dou liked to use the illusionistic device of a niche or window to frame figures such as this boy. Formed from an oval set into a rectangle, the ‘frame’ thus produced box-like cavities at each corner of the panel, features that enabled the artist to indicate the fall of light on the viewer’s side.

Training initially as a glazier, Dou was attached to Rembrandt’s studio between 1628 and 1631, emerging as a polished and, in due course, greatly admired painter of small-scale portraits and genre scenes. When the Dutch States General presented a gift of paintings to King Charles II of England in 1660, three paintings by Dou were included. The artist declined
an invitation to go to the English court, however, preferring to remain in Leiden, where he received a steady stream of distinguished statesmen-admirers, including the Florentine Duke Cosimo III de’ Medici.

Tony Magnusson, Curator of European Art, 2016–18