FLEMISH SCHOOL, CIRCA 1615

In this striking portrait, a gentlemen dressed in a cassock of rich black silk stands by a delicate assay balance, suggesting the nature of his trade as either a merchant in gold or silver or an essayeur. Wearing a rare example of a starched double collar, largely out of fashion by 1615 and typically seen in The Hague and on occasion in Amsterdam, his tight sleeves and belt are consistent with this dating, suggesting a likely date of execution. The artist, though unknown, shows certain stylistic affinities with Flemish portrait painters of the first years of the seventeenth century and may have been an emigré to the northern Netherlands, where he likely painted this portrait.

He is depicted with the tools of his trade, which evidently provided much financial success, holding a nugget of precious mental with an ornamented pair of tweezers, and weighing it accurately with an ornate lifting mechanism that worked by means of a counterpoise, seen here in the form of a lion (see J. M. Shannon and G. C. Shannon, The Assay Balance: Its Evolution and the Histories of the Companies that Made Them, Lakewood, 1999).