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Thomas de Keyser
A Gentleman, 1631
This portrait shows de Keyser's technical mastery; his rendering of the beautifully patterned black garments and bleached lace that prosperous Dutch burghers wore in the early 1600s is particularly striking.
This unidentified man stands before an idealized setting consisting of drapery, a classical column, and a landscape, a format taken from aristocratic portraits of the time. Similar devices appear in formal portraits by Anthony van Dyck and John Michael Wright also in this gallery. This attractive but very artificial style of highly finished, optically rendered textures and cliched settings was soon challenged by an emphasis on the psychology of the sitter, especially in the portraits by Rembrandt. |