Wallerant Vaillant

Emile Wolf, New York,
thence by descent

Hinge mounted in two places along the upper edge to a modern mount. There is evidence of some abrasion to the extremities of the sheet, created over time by the old mount, which would have covered the edges. There is some very minor surface dirt in places, however the drawing remains in predominantly good condition, with the sitter's face particularly fine. Sold in a stained darkwood frame.
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Wallerant Vaillant was a pioneering specialist in striking monochrome portraits.  As a printmaker, he was the first to specialise in the dramatic, tonal medium of mezzotint, making various influential technical innovations, and as a draughtsman he developed an original and distinctive technique for drawing monochrome portraits in black and white chalks on blue paper, which in many ways parallels the visual effects of his mezzotints.   Perhaps the high point of his career came when he was commissioned, in 1658, to take the portraits of the dignitaries who gathered in Frankfurt-am-Main, to elect the next Holy Roman Emperor, following the death of Ferdinand III.  For a fuller account of Vaillant's achievements as a portraitist, and his Frankfurt portraits of 1658, see William W. Robinson's recent entry on the drawing from the series, the portrait of Johann Philipp von Schönborn, Archbishop of Mainz, now in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums.¹

This portrait of an unidentified sitter, though executed several years before the artist's seminal journey to Frankfurt, shares many visual qualities with the important series of drawings that he made there, qualities that are particularly evident thanks to the sheet's excellent state of preservation.

^1. W.W. Robinson, with contributions from Susan Anderson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt. Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Mass., 2016, pp. 287-9, no. 86