Frans Pourbus the Elder, 'Portrait of Dom Andreas Boulengier', about 1580

We are not certain of the identity of the sitter in this damaged portrait, although he may have been a Benedictine or Augustinian canon. His beard is short and he wears a black biretta and dark clothes lined with spotted fur, possibly lynx. The coat of arms in the upper right corner is the same as that on the ring on the sitter’s index finger.

Two inscriptions are visible in normal light, and more clearly in infrared photographs: in the upper left corner D. ANDREAS; in the upper right AETATIS SUA 52, or possibly 42. The D seems to be short for ‘Dom’, an abbreviation of Dominus (lord), the title given to professed monks of various orders as well as to certain canons regular. The man’s beard and clothing in this painting is similar to those worn by the Benedictine Jaspar de Bovincourt, who was made Abbot of St Peter’s at Oudenburg, west of Bruges, in 1569.

The dark brown inscription on the arm of the sitter’s chair is F Pourbus, although it has been altered – perhaps in an attempt to create a false Holbein signature. This is therefore a signed portrait by Frans Pourbus the Elder, probably painted towards the end of his career. It may be compared with the heads of the Hoefnagel Family (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels) and other paintings of around 1580. The chair appears in at least three other portraits by Porbus, and may have belonged to the artist.

This must originally have been a painting of exceedingly high quality: the paint is worked wet-in-wet; the fur is very skilfully painted and sgraffito is used (where a top layer of paint was scraped away to reveal the layer beneath), for example in the decoration around the upper left sleeve. The sixteenth-century art historian Van Mander reported that Porbus trained in Frans Floris‘ workshop, and Floris sometimes said of Porbus, ’There goes my master'.