Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left
Provenance
Private collection, Madrid
London, Sotheby’s, 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 to take place in 2026 at the Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden and Serlachius Museums, Mänttä, curated by Dr. Volker Manuth.
Bibliography
Arthur Wheelock, ‘Making Faces: The Development of the Tronie in Seventeenth-Century Leiden’, in Nicholas Hall, 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.
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.
This so far anonymous genre painter was first studied in an essay by Theodor von Frimmel in 1904 and has more recently been discussed in greater detail by Werner Sumowski. The artist is known as the Monogrammist I.S. on the basis of works clearly by the same hand signed enigmatically, “I.S.” Opinions vary as to whether he was originally Baltic or a Dutch-born painter, but what is not in doubt is that he worked in Leiden. David de Witt of the Museum het Rembrandthuis has recently proposed that the Monogrammist I.S. was Dutch but travelled east via Scandinavia. The painter looked closely at the Leiden school, especially the early work of Rembrandt (Residenzgalerie, Salzburg, inv. no. 549; fig. 1), Lievens, and Gerard Dou around 1630. Like the Monogrammist I.S., Rembrandt engaged in the tradition of painting imaginary figures from Eastern Europe, such as The Polish Rider of ca. 1655, now at The Frick Collection in New York. The Monogrammist’s few known paintings range in date from 1632 to 1658. The closest example to the present work is the Portrait of an Old Woman in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, signed and dated 1651 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, inv. no. 419; fig. 2). Both pictures may be classified as tronies, a genre developed in the Netherlands chiefly in the first half of the seventeenth century where anonymous sitters, apparently based on live models, are presented as examples of various physical types.
They are typically striking in physiognomy and dress. In many respects they anticipate the capriccio heads by Piazzetta and the Tiepolo family in late Baroque and Rococo Venice. In the Vienna painting (fig. 2), the obsessive cartography of the sitter’s headdress and wrinkled skin resembles that of the Monogrammist and also looks forward to the more showy and picturesque head studies of the eighteenth-century German artists Balthasar Denner and Christian Seybold, or the Venetian Giuseppe Nogari.
The Monogrammist I.S. clearly appealed to discriminating collectors at an early period. The Old Woman and the Man with a Growth on his Nose (inv. no. NM 645), both in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, are first recorded as belonging to Johan Gabriel Stenbock in 1705. Stenbock was Swedish and made a brilliant career at court and in the civil service. He invested his fortune with Dutch bankers and owned other paintings by Rembrandt and his school. Subsequently, both pictures by the Monogrammist I.S. passed into the Sparre and Tessin collections, among the best known in eighteenth-century Sweden. The Old Woman in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna, is first recorded as no. 736 in the celebrated collection of the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1647–56.
The present work shows a middle-aged subject, younger than that in the Vienna painting, and is psychologically more original in the woman’s dispassionate gaze as if stoically accepting whatever life has to offer. Indeed, there are few paintings in Dutch art which display such uncompromising detachment. Another related tronie by the Monogrammist is an old woman in a cloak with fur collar in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, inv. no. NM 646; fig 3), which has a clinical objectivity that recalls Georges de La Tour. Our painting thus makes a rare and exciting addition to the small oeuvre of this extraordinary painter, capable of supreme verisimilitude.
Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr.