A Tronie of a Bearded Old Man in Profile, Facing Left

Out of the shadow

A painting’s fate can be sealed for generations by one scholar’s early judgement. In his encompassing monograph and catalogue raisonné Jan Lievens: Sein Leben und seine Werke, published in 1932, the Swiss art historian and director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in The Hague Hans Schneider (1888-1953) notes under his catalogue number 165, Jan Lievens’ Bust of a Greybeard in the Hermitage the existence of ‘a copy (panel, 60 x 50, signed with Rembrandt’s monogram and dated 1631) in the collection P. Esch in Cologne, 1922’. Although the measurements given by Schneider differ slightly, and the (false) Rembrandt monogram and the date 1631 are no longer present, the painting Schneider described in the collection of the Cologne lawyer and writer Adam Paul Esch (1875-1950) is in fact the present Lilian work.

As the better-known painting in the Hermitage was thus embraced as Lievens’ original, the present work was – with precious little motivation – all too easily deemed a ‘copy’. However, in Lievens we find a young and notoriously restless artist, whose endless curiosity led him to sometimes revisit earlier efforts, in part to speed up production and meet client demand, but just as much to experiment with variant styles, techniques and compositional adjustments, producing creative reinterpretations with alternate results. Following the surfacing of the present work, both Schnackenburg (2022) and De Witt (2025) inspected the work firsthand, and independently concluded that it concerns a fully autograph rendering, datable around the same period as the Hermitage painting, c. 1630/32.

Indeed, looking at both works it is clear that although the model is likely the same individual, the two paintings differ so significantly, and on various levels, that one might best regard them as variations, rather than versions. The face and the incarnate in the Lilian painting were executed with coloristic bravura – white, greys, various pinks and red, all adding to a dazzling unity – and a phenomenal paint handling with short individual strokes that drape the wrinkles and the sinuous veins around the glimmering black eye. Such are the differences, that we can safely conclude that Lievens varied all of this on purpose, leaving the overall impression that in the present painting he endeavoured to convey the sitter as alert and energetic, in the Hermitage painting as more tranquil, sedate. Extravert versus introvert, the vita activa versus the vita contemplativa, as it were.