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Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat
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Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat
Michael Sweerts(Brussels 1618 – 1664 Goa)ca. 1655–56
oil on canvas
39 x 27 cm
MS-101

How to cite
Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat” (2017). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 3rd ed. Edited byArthur K. Wheelock Jr. and Lara Yeager-Crasselt. New York, 2020–23. https://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/(archived December 2023).
A PDF of every version of this entry is available in this Online Catalogue's Archive, and the Archive is managed by apermanent URL. New versions are added only when a substantive change to the narrative occurs.

© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat
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Rendered with red and brown earth tones and a light that catches his glistening blue

Comparative Figureseyes and parted lips, Michael Sweerts’s Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat evokes thetenderness of boyhood. The figure’s averted gaze and slightly turned shoulders suggest
his attention is directed elsewhere, but Sweerts depicted the details of his dress andfeatures with such softness and tactility that he seems strikingly present before theviewer. He wears a slightly tattered, broad-brimmed hat pushed back on his head to
expose waves of reddish brown hair accented by his ocher-red jacket. It, too, seems
worn, as the light reveals small tears in the seams on his right shoulder. Sweerts
manipulated the light to play across the boy’s forehead, cheeks and nose, casting richshadows along the left side of his face and jagged patterns descending along his armand torso. Although he appears to be from a lower social class, Sweerts has rendered
him with gentle grace.
The lifelike quality of this image suggests that it was done directly from life, or naer
het leven, in the Netherlandish tradition of the tronie.[1] These head studies, whichappear so exacting in their representation that they could be mistaken for formal

Fig 1. Michael Sweerts, Boy with aHat, ca. 1655–56, oil on canvas, 36.9 x
29.2 cm, Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn., TheElla Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin
Sumner Collection Fund, 1940.198

portraits, were instead highly individualized depictions of anonymous figures.
Removed from a specific time or place, tronies gave artists the opportunity to focus
on the physical and psychological character of an individual.[2] Tronies of young men
particularly interested Sweerts after he returned to Brussels in the early to mid-1650s,and Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat is one of at least five similar images that heexecuted in that decade.[3] While Sweerts also depicted young and old women with asimilar degree of sensitivity, his representation of young men was exceptional in theseventeenth century, both in number and discerning manner of execution.[4] Theseworks, as evidenced in the Leiden Collection painting, demonstrated Sweerts’s ability
to create a pictorial experience both immediate and timeless.
This approach is similarly evident in Sweerts’s Boy with a Hat in Hartford (fig 1).[5]The figure wears a similar broad-brimmed hat, though pushed farther down on hisFig 2. Youth with a Fur-Trimmed Cap,
1656, etching, 9 x 8.2 cm, from theseries Diversae facies in usum
iuvenum et aliorum, Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam, inv. no. RPP-1888-A-13822

head, and a white collared shirt beneath a tattered jacket. As he gazes over his rightshoulder, his body recedes sharply back into space. Sweerts repeated thiscompositional device—the turned head and angled shoulders—in his images of young
men from the latter half of the 1650s, including Portrait of a Youth in San Francisco,from ca. 1659–61.[6] The somewhat awkward frontal emphasis and tightly cropped
composition of the Leiden Collection painting distinguishes it from Sweerts’s othermale tronies and suggests that it may have been among the first of this series of tronies
that he painted in the mid-1650s.
Sweerts’s tronies may have had a didactic function. In Brussels, Sweerts established adrawing academy for young artists and tapestry designers to learn how to draw aFig 3. Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a
Pearl Earring, ca. 1665–66, oil on© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat
Page 4 of 8model from life.[7] This academic exercise may have been complemented bySweerts’s own Diversae facies, a print series of various head studies that he publishedcanvas, 46.5 x 40 cm, Mauritshuis,
The Hague, inv. 670

in 1656.[8] Following in the tradition of earlier seventeenth-century drawing books,
these etchings represented a range of character types for students to copy as part oftheir training. One such etching from this series, Youth with a Fur-Trimmed Cap (fig2), shares a number of stylistic and compositional similarities with Portrait of a Young
Boy with a Hat. The half-length figure is positioned against an empty backgroundwith his head and shoulders turned to the left. Sweerts rendered the figure with asimilar use of chiaroscuro, even creating distinct patterns of shadows on his jacket.
Although noticeably older than the boy in the Leiden Collection painting, this etchingdemonstrates how Sweerts was able to modify a range of character types in age,gender, and dress to suit his needs in print or paint. Much as with the etchings,
Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat could have served as a model for Sweerts’s
students in the academy.[9]Sweerts’s sensitive representation of an individual set against an undefined, dark
background shares stylistic similarities with Johannes Vermeer’s (1632–75) Girl witha Pearl Earring (fig 3). The latter work, painted a decade after Sweerts’s image,similarly conveys a timeless, classicizing beauty.[10] Although the two artists likely
never met, the ability of Sweerts and Vermeer to evoke the spirit of an individual andrender him or her, regardless of class, with an unusual sense of dignity reflects ashared artistic sensibility.

- Lara Yeager-Crasselt, 2017

© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat
Page 5 of 8Endnotes
1. See Lyckle de Vries, “Tronies and Other Single Figured Netherlandish Paintings,” Leids KunsthistorischJaarboek 8 (1989): 185–202; and most recently, Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in derniederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2008); and Franziska Gottwald, Das Tronie:
Muster-Studie-Meisterwerk (Berlin and Munich, 2011).
2. Tronies were deeply admired and collected by contemporaries throughout the Netherlands, and renderedby artists such as Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), Jan Lievens(1607–74), and Pieter de Grebber (ca. 1600–52/53). For the genesis of the tronie as a genre and its
different manifestations in the Netherlands, see note 1 above.
3. See Rolf Kultzen, Michael Sweerts: Brussels 1618–Goa 1664 (Doornspijk, 1996), 64–71, nos. 45, 94–96,
98; and Guido Jansen and Peter C. Sutton, eds., Michael Sweerts (1618–1664) (Exh. cat. Amsterdam,Rijksmuseum; San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art) (Zwolle, 2001), nos. 24–25, 28. Sweerts’s tronies are not signed or dated. Kultzen dated
these images to Sweerts’s brief Dutch period, under the belief that the artist had arrived in Amsterdam
in the late 1650s. More recent documentation has informed us that Sweerts was in Brussels until 1659,
and in all likelihood executed this series of tronies before he departed his native city. While the figuresin these tronies typically wear peasant dress, Sweerts also depicted a young man in exotic costume,
Young Man with a Turban and Flowers, ca. 1658–61, oil on canvas, 76.4 x 61.8 cm, Museo ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid. See Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, no. 23. Dagmar Hirschfelder discusses
Sweerts’s tronies in the context of her greater study as an exceptional case in the development of theDutch tronie; see Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17.
Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2008), 150–52, nos. 510–11, 514–15.
4. For Sweerts’s depictions of female figures, see, for example, Head of an Old Woman, ca. 1655–61, oilon panel, 49.2 x 38.1 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and A Young Maidservant, ca. 1660,oil on canvas, 61 x 53.5 cm, Fondation Aetas Aurea, Vaduz, Liechtenstein. The work of the Brugesartist Jacob van Oost the Elder (1603–71) bears striking similarities to Sweerts’s handling of the figure
and composition, and he, too, depicted a number of images of children. See, for example, YoungWoman, ca. 1665, oil on canvas mounted on panel, 41.3 x 31.7 cm, private collection; Guido Jansen andPeter C. Sutton, eds., Michael Sweerts (1618–1664) (Exh. cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; SanFrancisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art)
(Zwolle, 2001), 151, fig. XXV-2; and Portrait of a Boy, ca. 1650, oil on canvas, 80 x 63 cm, National
Gallery, London.
5. See Rolf Kultzen, Michael Sweerts: Brussels 1618–Goa 1664 (Doornspijk, 1996), no. 98; and Guido
Jansen and Peter C. Sutton, eds., Michael Sweerts (1618–1664) (Exh. cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum;
San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art)
(Zwolle, 2001), no. 24.
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Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat
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6. Portrait of a Youth, ca. 1659–61, oil on canvas, 39.4 x 34.8 cm, Fine Arts Museum San Francisco,
Roscoe and Margaret Oakes Collection. This boy seems to come from a different social class. HereSweerts has replaced the peasant costume with a more fashionable white, broad-collared shirt and finely
buttoned jacket. See Rolf Kultzen, Michael Sweerts: Brussels 1618–Goa 1664, trans. Diane Webb(Doornspijk, 1996), no. 96; and Guido Jansen and Peter C. Sutton, eds., Michael Sweerts (1618–1664)(Exh. cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hartford,Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) (Zwolle, 2001), no. 25.
7. See Jonathan Bikker, “Sweerts’ Life and Career—A Documentary View,” in Michael Sweerts(1618–1664), ed. Guido Jansen and Peter C. Sutton (Exh. cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; SanFrancisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art)
(Zwolle, 2001), 25–36.
8. For these etchings, see Ger Luijten, “‘For the Young and Others’: The Prints of Michael Sweerts,” inMichael Sweerts (1618–1664), ed. Guido Jansen and Peter C. Sutton (Exh. cat. Amsterdam,Rijksmuseum; San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art) (Zwolle, 2001), 167–78, nos. P9–P21. For Dutch and Flemish drawing books, see Jaap
Bolten, Method and Practice: Dutch and Flemish Drawing Books, 1600–1750 (Landau, 1985). Suchetchings may have also been intended as collector’s items, as they were never bound into a book but
remained as single sheets. For the tradition of this type of series, see, for instance, Jan Lievens’s Diverse
Tronikens, small etchings of various head studies, which were probably published while the artist was in
Antwerp in 1635–44. See Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., ed., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered (Exh.
cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum; Amsterdam,Museum Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), nos. 62–66. For the use of tronies as studies foremotion and character, see also Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malereides 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2008), 328–34, for Sweerts, 332.
9. This point is also raised in Guido Jansen and Peter C. Sutton, eds., Michael Sweerts (1618–1664) (Exh.
cat. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum; San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hartford,
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) (Zwolle, 2001), 151. In her recent study of the genesis of thetronie, Franziska Gottwald traces its origins to the medieval workshop, examining its use as a type ofmodel and ultimately its development into an autonomous genre in the seventeenth century. Sweerts,
however, is not discussed in the context of Gottwald’s study. See Franziska Gottwald, Das Tronie:
Muster-Studie-Meisterwerk (Berlin, 2011).
10. For a discussion of the artistic relationship between Sweerts and Vermeer, see Rolf Kultzen, Michael
Sweerts: Brussels 1618–Goa 1664, trans. Diane Webb (Doornspijk, 1996), 65–66; Arthur K. Wheelock
Jr., Johannes Vermeer (Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; The Hague, Mauritshuis)(New Haven, 1995), 168; Walter Liedtke, A View of Delft: Vermeer and His Contemporaries (Zwolle,2001), 241–42; and Dagmar Hirschfelder, Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17.
Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2008), 198.

© 2024 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Young Boy with a Hat
Page 7 of 8ProvenanceFranz Theodor Bettendorf (1763–1809), Aachen and Brussels.
Clemens B. Lagemann, Aachen, as by Pieter de Grebber.
Private collection, Paderborn.
Frau Anne Gold, Aachen.
[Bob Haboldt, Paris, 1995].
Private collection, France (private sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 2009).
From whom acquired by the present owner in 2009.

Exhibition History
Rome, Scuderie del Quirinale, “Vermeer: Il secolo d’oro dell’arte olandese,” 26 September 2012–20
January 2013, no. 43 [lent by the present owner].

References
Habolt, Bob. Singular Vision: Haboldt & Co.’s Old Master Paintings and Drawings since 1983.
Amsterdam, 2012, 384.
Kultzen, Rolf. Michael Sweerts: Brussels 1618–Goa 1664. Doornspijk, 1996, 66, 70, n. 64, 71, n. 67,
119–20, no. 100.
Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. “Ritratto di fanciullo con cappello.” In Vermeer. Il secolo d’oro dell’arte olandese.
Edited by Walter Liedtke, Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., and Sandrina Bandera, 196–97, no. 43. Exh. cat.
Rome, Scuderie Del Quirinale. Rome, 2012.
Yeager-Crasselt, Lara. Michael Sweerts (1618-1664): Shaping the Artist and the Academy in Rome andBrussels (Pictura Nova XXI). Turnhout, 2015, 41, 99, 102, 104; pl. 40.

Technical Summary
The support, a single piece of medium-weight, plain, closed-weave fabric with all four tacking margins
removed, has been Beva-lined with a fine fabric interleaf. There is no obvious cusping, and paper tapeextends onto the stretcher along the upper and lower edges only. Thin wood shims have been attached along© 2024 The Leiden CollectionPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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the left and right edges with brads. There are two labels, but no wax seals, import stamps or stencils along thelining or stretcher.
A light-colored ground has been thinly and evenly applied. The paint has been applied with loose fluid
brushstrokes in thin, smooth, glazes with no use of impasto. Raised dabs of white highlights have been
applied to the figure’s pupils, lower eyelids, proper right eyebrow, side of nose, and jacket seam along theproper right shoulder.
No underdrawing or compositional changes are readily apparent in infrared images captured at 780–1000
nanometers or as pentimenti. There is no X-radiograph of the painting.
The painting is unsigned and undated.
The painting was cleaned and restored in 1994 and remains in a good state of preservation.

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