Italian, Emilian, 'Portrait of a Painter', about 1650

A young man is shown in half length, his body turned slightly but with his gaze fixed firmly on us. His black jacket, buttoned down the front, and ribbon tied around his white shirt cuff imply that he is a man of some means. His features are quite particular – a wide mouth, long and prominent nose, dark wavy hair and brown eyes – but his identity remains a mystery. He is clearly a painter: he holds a brush in one hand, with which he is mixing colours on the painter’s palette he grasps in the other.

This may be a portrait of an artist or possibly a self portrait – it is difficult to tell which because in both instances artists were often shown in the act of painting. When this work entered the National Gallery’s collection in 1906, it was thought to be a self portrait by the Bolognese painter Benedetto Gennari (1633–1715), who was the nephew and pupil of Guercino. This identification cannot be sustained if you compare the man’s features with those in Gennari’s self portrait today in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Nor can the painting be attributed to Gennari on stylistic grounds.

Although both the artist and sitter have yet to be convincingly identified, the picture is probably Emilian (painted by an artist from Emilia-Romagna) and datable to the mid-seventeenth century.