LOT DETAILS

Materials:

oil on panel

Size Notes:

panel: 18 by 15 in.; 47 by 38 cm.

Edition:

Lievens is credited with playing a central role in the creation of the genre of the autonomous tronie. Whilst his Flemish contemporaries, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck, were producing head studies in preparation for of use in larger compositions, Lievens was creating paintings of heads and characters that were marketable pictures in their own right, often painted from life. Tronies, literally meaning 'head', 'face' or 'facial expression' in Dutch, are not portraits or part of any other established genre, but simply a means to master the art of characterization, as Lievens has done in this carefully observed head. Lievens tronies were enormously influential, and their impact spread throughout the Netherlands and today are best, or perhaps more usually, appreciated within the uvre of Lievenss childhood friend Rembrandt van Rijn.

Description:

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Markings:

This strongly-lit study of an elderly man is an early work by Jan Lievens, dated by Schnackenburg to circa 1624, when the artist must have been exposed to the first generation of Dutch Caravaggisti who were just then starting to return to the North from Rome. Over the last decade and a half, several early works by Jan Lievens have come to light, and his early oeuvre, and the dating of it, has been reassessed. The exhibition devoted to Lievens in 2009 under a team of distinguished scholars led by Arthur Wheelock was subtitled - with good reason - A Dutch Master Rediscovered, and cast much fresh light on various aspects of Lievens oeuvre, not least of which was his work at the outset of his career, in the mid-1620s.1

Condition:

framed: 27 by 24 ? in.; 69.9 by 61.3 cm.