Man with a Turban
Man with a Turban is a painting on panel by Jan Lievens, executed in the late 1620s when he worked closely with Rembrandt in Leiden. It was acquired through Nicholas Hall by a private collector.
Provenance
Aristocratic French Collection, since 1800
Private collection, Paris
with Nicholas Hall, New York; sold to the following
Private collection
Exhibitions
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer, 24 February – 26 May 2024
Literature
Bernhard Schnackenburg, Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the Young Rembrandt, Petersberg, 2016, pp. 138, 463, reproduced.
Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., “Making Faces: The Development of the Tronie in Seventeenth-Century Leiden,” in Anonymous Portraits: Dutch Seventeenth-Century Tronies, p. 13, as by Jan Lievens, reproduced.
Lizzie Marx, “Face Time”, National Gallery of Ireland Magazine, Spring 2024, pp. 2-8, reproduced.
John-Paul Stonard, “On Jan Lievens“, in London Review of Books, vol. 46, no. 10, 23 May 2024, reproduced.
To be included in Dr. Lloyd DeWitt’s forthcoming catalogue raisonné as by Jan Lievens.
Essay
The reputation of Jan Lievens was for long outshone by that of his great contemporary Rembrandt. Rembrandt was undoubtedly an artist of greater range and feeling. However, in both artists’ Leiden years in the 1620s and early 1630s, Lievens was regarded as a prodigy and more or less Rembrandt’s equal as a propagator of early Dutch realism, expressed in a rather monochrome palette like landscape painters of the time. Lievens was taken up by Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), the powerful secretary to the Prince of Orange, who the artist recorded in a well-known portrait of 1628–9 today on loan to the Rijksmuseum.[1] In 1632 Lievens left for London where he adopted the more international style of the newly installed van Dyck. This served him well at the time but led to the eclipse of his reputation in later generations.
The Man with a Turban differs from Rembrandt in showing a more specific influence of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, notably Honthorst and Baburen, in the man’s powerful physical presence emphasized by strong chiaroscuro. The impact of Rubens, whose work he would have known at the Stadtholder’s court at The Hague, is also felt in the richness and variety of the brushwork. The handling reflects the energy and speed with which Lievens worked and his technical sophistication. The flesh and the turban are laid on with thick impasto, building up the colors. For the beard he uses a thin application of dark brown, but then drags the handle of the brush through the wet paint in the opposite direction to the brushstrokes to uncover a lighter ground and create a pattern of whiskers that catch the light. This is a technique common to many of his paintings in this period, for example the Bearded Man with a Beret in the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2006.172.1). Lievens treats the flesh around the eyes with equal vigor but with shorter strokes in different directions that chart the complex web of folds and wrinkles. The artist’s creative energy and virtuosity at this time was praised by Huygens who wrote “compared with his age, the production of the illustrious youth is immense. Seeing the maker beside his paintings, it is scarcely credible that such a meagre sapling can put forth so much fruit. In painting the human countenance, he works miracles.”
This Man in a Turban has been assigned by Schnackenburg to Dirck Lievens,[3] the younger brother of Jan, on the basis of a documentary reference to an unidentified painted profile ‘portrait of a Persian’ by Dirck recorded in the Orlers collection.[4] However, Arthur Wheelock,[5] Lloyd de Witt,[6] Gregor Weber,[7] Jonathan Bikker and Taco Dibbits [8] all support the traditional attribution to Jan Lievens. Wheelock and Weber date this panel to the late 1620s, a dating supported by recent dendrochronological testing.[9] De Witt will include this picture in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné on Jan Lievens. He considers the present work to be a “strong and dynamic example of a Jan Lievens tronie” and typical of his technique around 1630. Wheelock believes that the scale and the accentuated profile format of this panel are characteristic of works of Jan Lievens painted in the late 1620s.
The Man in the Turban falls into the category of the tronie, a type of subject developed in the 17th century showing imaginary individuals, painted from life, often with striking physical features and exotic dress such as the Boy in a Cape and Turban. Both Rembrandt and Lievens painted numerous tronies at this time and sometimes used the same model. The oriental tronie in this case is a type which grew out of representations of the Adoration of the Magi. Subsequently, ‘orientals’ were used as stand-ins for any exotic figure in history or religious painting, but it was only in these early works by Rembrandt and Lievens that the depiction of single figures in exotic eastern garb led to a specific genre in Dutch painting. In the seventeenth century, ‘orientals’ were a popular subject since the Turks still remained a menace to western Europe until and beyond their defeat by Sobieski at the gates of Vienna in 1683. In the eighteenth century single oriental figures were a common feature in the works of the Tiepolo family in Venice, a city that had strong historic trading links with the Middle East.
The present painting has a provenance going back to France circa 1800 as is evident from an old pre-restoration photograph (fig. 4) showing it in its former empire frame. In the previous century, French painters like Jean Barbault and Jean Baptiste Le Prince, among others, made a specialty of single eastern figures both Arab and Chinese, an interest fueled by enlightenment interest in exotic climes and later sustained by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, when his armies were accompanied by a horde of savants. The greatest continuator of the single-figure tronie however was Fragonard whose celebrated series of Fantasy Figures, also dramatized likenesses of real people, was recently exhibited at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C. One of them, a Bust of an Old Man Wearing a Cap, shows the strong influence of Rembrandt.❖