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Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left

Date
ca. 1650

Medium
oil on canvas laid on panel

Dimension
34 x 27 cm

Date
ca. 1650

Medium
oil on canvas laid on panel

Dimension
34 x 27 cm

Provenance

Private Collection, Madrid for at least two generations
London, Sotheby’s, Old Master and British Paintings Evening Sale, 8 December 2010, lot 5
Daniel Katz Family Trust, London
Private Collection

 

Exhibitions
London, The National Gallery, on loan 2011–2018
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, Turning Heads: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer, 24 February–26 May 2024.
Requested for the first monographic exhibition of the artist, Master I.S. – Enigmatic Contemporary of Rembrandt, Serlachius Museums, Mänttä, 12 April–17 August 2025, travelling to Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, 10 October 2025–8 March 2026

 

Bibliography

Arthur Wheelock, ‘Making Faces: The Development of the Tronie in Seventeenth-Century Leiden’, Anonymous Portraits: Dutch Seventeenth-Century Tronies, New York, 2019, pp. 24-26, reproduced fig. 24.
Lizzie Marx, ‘Face Time: Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer take centre stage among striking depictions of human expression by Dutch and Flemish artists’, The Gallery: National Gallery of Ireland Magazine, Dublin, Spring 2024, p. 26, reproduced.
Janneke van Asperen, Volke Manuth and Tomi Moisio, eds., Master I.S. Enigmatic Contemporary of Rembrandt, exh. cat., Leiden, 2025, pp. 31-32 and 61, reproduced plate 29 (forthcoming).

 

Related literature

Theodor von Frimmel, ‘Von Monogrammisten IS’, Blatten für Gemäldekunde, 1904, pp. 132-133.
Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, Landau-Pfalz, 1983, vol. IV, p. 2548.

An elderly woman gazes dispassionately to the left. Her glacial eyes catch the light that falls on her furrowed face. One notices the cyst on her left eyelid and the blotchy imperfections of her weathered skin, a testimony to the harsh years she has endured. Yet the gold trim of her headscarf, the striped chiffon coiled around her neck, the glistening gemmed brooch and fox fur-trimmed coat speak to a luxurious lifestyle that betrays her seemingly humble origins.

The artist of this enigmatic painting is known as the Monogrammist I.S. whose first ever monographic exhibition is due to take place in Mänttä, Finland and Leiden, The Netherlands in 2025 and 2026. Little remains certain about the artist’s origins or identity since he was first studied in 1904 by Theodor von Frimmel. Opinions vary as to whether the Monogrammist was a German, Baltic, or Dutch-born painter, but the consensus is that he worked in Leiden for the artist’s refined, articulated brushwork, his subject matter and his almost scientific realism reflect the influence of the young Rembrandt, Jan Lievens and the Fijnschilder Gerrit Dou. Besides a few paintings bearing the initials ‘I.S.’, most of the small body of works ascribed to the Monogrammist are done so on a stylistic basis. Dating between 1632 to 1658, his oeuvre comprises primarily of tronies—a type of character study, such as the present example, popularized by Rembrandt and his milieu starting around 1630. In many respects they anticipate the capriccio heads by Piazzetta and the Tiepolo family in late Baroque and Rococo Venice, as well as the more picturesque head studies of the eighteenth-century Venetian Giuseppe Nogari and German artists Balthasar Denner and Christian Seybold.

The present painting
Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left belongs to the period of the artist’s maturity when he painted a series of tronies of great distinction. Most comparable to our picture is the Old Woman in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (fig. 1), signed and dated 1651. Noticeably more wizened and disengaged, the woman wears a fur-collared coat and shimmery silk scarf on her head reminiscent of the ones worn by our sitter. As Volker Manuth and Marieke de Winkel note, the artist had a penchant for exotic costumes which, despite being partially visibly, provide crucial context for the head in his tronies. While artists in Rembrandt’s circle were no stranger to painting imaginary figures from Eastern Europe (e.g. Rembrandt, The Polish Rider, ca. 1655, The Frick Collection, New York, 1910.1.98), the Monogrammist’s sitters typically wear garments associated with life in colder regions of the continent. This includes a self-portrait by the artist identified by the curators of the upcoming monographic exhibition, which was formerly in the Getty Museum (fig. 2). In it, the artist dons a bejeweled, high-crowned fur hat, similar to the kalpaks traditionally worn in the Caucaus and the Baltic States, which also features in Rembrandt’s tronie, A Polish Nobleman (fig. 3). It is perhaps no coincidence that the woman in the present picture, with her pale blue eyes, high cheekbones and thick lips, show the physiognomic features still typically found in Northern and Northeastern Europe.
Fig. 1 Monogrammist I.S., Portrait of an Old Woman, ca. 1651, oil on oak, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Gemäldegalerie, 419
Fig. 2 Monogrammist I.S., Self Portrait, ca. 1638, oil on panel, formerly J. Paul Getty Musuem, Los Angeles, inv./cat.nr. 70.PB.13, deaccessioned in 2007. Image courtesy of the RKD
Fig. 3 Rembrandt van Rijn, Polish Nobleman, ca. 1637, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., 1937.1.78

The tronies by the Monogrammist clearly appealed to the most discriminating collectors in European history. The aforementioned Old Woman in the Kunsthistorisches Museum was first recorded as no. 736 in the celebrated collection of the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1647–56. Two other examples from his mature period,  the Old Woman  (fig. 4) and the Man with a Growth on his Nose (signed 1645; fig. 5), share the same early provenance: they are recorded as belonging in 1705 to Johan Gabriel Stenbock, a Swedish courtier who invested with Dutch bankers and owned other paintings by Rembrandt and his school. Subsequently, the paintings passed into the collections of Count Gustaf Adolf Sparre (1746–1794) and Count Carl Gustaf Tessin (1696–1770), among the best known in eighteenth-century Sweden. Curiously, Count Sparre’s brother Erik (1665–1726) made copies after both tronies in 1709, which are also preserved in the National Museum, Stockholm (fig. 6 and fig. 7, the man is painted with an addition of a hat).

Fig. 4 Monogrammist I.S., An Old Woman, ca. 1645, oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NM 646
Fig. 5 Monogrammist I.S., An Old Man with a Growth on his Nose, ca. 1645, oil on oak, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NM 645
Fig. 6 Erik Sparre, Old Woman, ca. 1709, oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMGrh811
Fig. 7 Erik Sparre, Old Man with a Growth on His Nose, ca. 1709, oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMGrh810

In recent years there has been a revived interest in artists from the northern fringes of Europe and a reassessment in their contribution to important artistic movements. Michel Sittow (1469­–1525), the Tallinn-born Renaissance court painter who likely trained with Hans Memling in Bruges, is one such example. His first ever monographic exhibition was held in 2018 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. as part of the centenary celebration of the founding of the Estonian Republic. The retrospective of the 19th-century Norwegian artist Peder Balke (1804­­–1887) at the National Gallery, London in 2015, and the Swedish painter of abstraction Hilma Af Klint (1862–1944) at the Guggenheim Museum in 2019 indicate a broader interest in the alternative narratives of art history. Evidently sought after for his compelling tronies with their haunting portrays of inner strength and human dignity, the Monogrammist could well be a key to the missing puzzle in our understanding of the cultural exchange between the important artistic centre of Leiden and Europe’s Northeastern frontiers.

We are grateful to Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. for his assistance in cataloguing this work, as well as Dr. Tomi Moisio, and Dr. Volker Manuth, curators of the forthcoming exhibition devoted to the Monogrammist I.S., for their dating of this work, which will be included in the exhibition.

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