Jan Provost (Bergen-Mons, Henegouwen c. 1465-1529 Bruges)

This Portrait of a man was probably initially part of a diptych. Though the original appearance is not known, two distinct reconstructions can be suggested. The more common form of this type of object would have been a devotional one, portraying the donor opposite a religious image, like the Virgin and Child or Christ as the Man of Sorrows. Though the sitter’s hands are not joined in prayer, he holds a rosary, an element which appears in other diptych donor portraits made in the Netherlands during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, like that of Philippe de Croÿ by Rogier van der Weyden in circa 1460 (Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, inv. no. 254). However, Provost’s Portrait of a man is depicted facing to the right on the left panel, the place typically reserved for iconographically more ‘significant’, Holy, figures. While this rule was not universal and could be adapted according to the uses and intended location of an image (Jan van Eyck’s Chancellor Rolin with the Virgin and Child, for example, shows the donor on the left of the composition, allowing his image to be presented kneeling in the direction of the high altar of his parish church of Notre-Dame-du-Chastel in Autun), it remained relatively unusual. Instead, the present portrait could have been paired with a pendant of the donor’s wife. The position of the man’s portrait in this case would be appropriate and the existence of other, highly similar examples, like that by Ambrosius Benson, another Bruges based painter, of Cornelius de Scheppere and Elisabeth Donche (New South Wales, Art Gallery of New South Wales), is convincing evidence in establishing this as the most likely original format of this small portrait.