Dutch school; c. 1600.

Dutch school; c. 1600.
"Portrait of a gentleman.
Oil on oak panel.
It retains the seal of the Infante Sebastián Gabriel de Borbón collection.
It has faults and damage caused by xylophages.
It has a 19th century frame.
Measurements: 48 x 41 cm; 69 x 62 cm (frame).
We see in this work a male portrait that presents us a young gentleman with sharp and elegant features, soberly dressed with a military uniform that shows a fleur-de-lis on his chest in golden colour. The luminosity of the face is emphasised by the flesh tones and a spotlight directed on the young man's face. The artist particularly emphasised the somewhat direct and penetrating gaze, which speaks to us of the psychology of the sitter, thus emphasising the formal distance typical of Baroque portraiture. The composition is sober, typical of Dutch portraiture of the time: the sitter is depicted bust-length, turned three-quarters of the way round with his head slightly turned towards the front, in the foreground, against a neutral, dark background, although somewhat brighter around the sitter's head. This work is attributed to Frans Pourbus the Younger (Antwerp, 1569 - Paris, 1622), a Flemish painter, son of Frans Pourbus the Elder and grandson of Pieter Pourbus. Pourbus worked for many of the most influential people of his time, including the Spanish regents of the Netherlands based in Brussels, the Duke of Mantua and Marie de Medici, Queen of France.


It was undoubtedly in the paintings of the Dutch school that the consequences of the political emancipation of the region, as well as the economic prosperity of the liberal bourgeoisie, were most overtly manifested. The combination of the discovery of nature, objective observation, the study of the concrete, the appreciation of the everyday, the taste for the real and the material, the sensitivity to the apparently insignificant, meant that the Dutch artist was at one with the reality of everyday life, without seeking any ideal that was alien to that same reality. The painter did not seek to transcend the present and the materiality of objective nature or to escape from tangible reality, but to envelop himself in it, to become intoxicated by it through the triumph of realism, a realism of pure illusory fiction, achieved thanks to a perfect, masterly technique and a conceptual subtlety in the lyrical treatment of light. As a result of the break with Rome and the iconoclastic tendency of the Reformed Church, paintings with religious themes were eventually eliminated as a decorative complement with a devotional purpose, and mythological stories lost their heroic and sensual tone in accordance with the new society. Portraits, landscapes and animals, still lifes and genre painting were the thematic formulas that became valuable in their own right and, as objects of domestic furniture - hence the small size of the paintings - were acquired by individuals from almost all social classes and classes of society.