David de Haen painted this strikingly immediate portrait in Rome, around the time when he was working with his compatriot Dirck van Baburen (c. 1594/95–1624) for Pietro Cussida, agent of King Philip III of Spain. Pictured within a fictive oval frame, a man—probably the artist himself—dressed in a garment with red and black striped sleeves and holding a palette, tilts his head and grins broadly, revealing uneven teeth. The artist has captured his likeness as he laughs heartily, creating the impression of a jovial person addressing a companion; and indeed, Gianni Papi has suggested that De Haen and Baburen, who are recorded in the Stati delle Anime of 1619 and 1620 as living together in the area of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte (‘sotto la Trinità dei Monti giù per la piazza’), at around this date, or slightly earlier, each made their own self-portrait in response to one another: this one painted by De Haen around 1617–19; and the other, a recently discovered self-portrait by Baburen and an important new addition to his œuvre (see lot 19).¹

Spontaneous in its execution, this large and confident likeness shows the artist’s characteristically fluid application of paint. During the course of painting, De Haen changed the size of the palette and made it wider: the lines scored into the surface to set out its curve show that it was initially narrower. In the flesh tones De Haen’s handling is blended and smooth. He makes bold transitions between colours; working into wet paint, strokes of dark paint are applied to define lines of shadow cast by the sleeveless garment onto the red doublet beneath. Buttons and buttonholes are deftly described. Loosely painted strokes of white render the collar and provide a brighter accent to the smiling eyes and mouth. Shades of tawny brown enliven the hair and hat; they also circumscribe the edge of the frame as it catches the light and give a trompe l’œil effect to its variegated surface.

Foremost among Baburen’s collaborators, De Haen worked alongside him on important Roman commissions, notably between 1617 and 1619 in the chapel of the Pietà in the church of San Pietro in Montorio, where he painted a lunette of the Mocking of Christ (fig. 1).² Their work together is first recounted by Giulio Mancini, papal physician, writer on art, biographer and connoisseur, who in his Considerazioni sulla pittura of about 1617–21, without naming the promising young artist, describes him as a man of 22 or 23 years of age.³ The jeering faces of the two henchmen in De Haen’s lunette, or the tortured grimace of Marsyas in a signed drawing of Apollo flaying Marsyas (Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence),⁴ show his ability to capture convincing expressions, a compelling aspect also of this portrait, in which De Haen demonstrates how attuned he is to the realistic depiction of facial expression.

Born probably in Amsterdam, perhaps around 1585—although Rotterdam has also been suggested and some scholars argue for a considerably later birthdate in the mid-1590s—De Haen left his native city for Italy, never to return. Only a dozen or so works by him are known. The earliest is a signed and dated portrait of 1616 in a private collection (fig. 2).⁵ Alongside his activity as a painter of religious subjects, it is likely he also worked as a portraitist, although other examples have not yet come to light. In 1621, after the years with Baburen, he lived in the palazzo al Corso of the Cussida, for whom he painted a set of four Evangelists now in the cathedral of La Seo at Zaragoza,⁶ the family’s city of origin. He died the following year in 1622, in the household of the marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564–1637), in whose palazzo he was living at the time. His premature death evokes Mancini’s foreboding comment in his biography ‘if he lives’, which has been interpreted as an allusion to a life of heavy drinking and excess. Giustiniani, a staunch supporter and patron of Caravaggio (1571–1610), amassed a rich collection of contemporary art, which featured paintings by Northern European Caravaggesque painters, including Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, Baburen and De Haen, who painted for him the large and ambitious Deposition formerly in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, a work that was destroyed in the Second World War.⁷

This painting was once thought to be a self-portrait by Honthorst until Cecilia Grilli reassigned it to De Haen when it was still with Piero Corsini in New York.⁸ Grilli was the first to publish it as a possible self-portrait in her article of 1997, which sought to define his activity in Rome. There she drew a line of development from the 1616 portrait, to the Saint John the Evangelist for Cussida, to the present work, in which she detected the strong influence of Dirck van Baburen, and compared the work to Pan holding a syrinx, c. 1619, in a private collection.⁹ Dating the present work to the period of Baburen’s collaboration with De Haen in the later 1610s, she put forward the suggestion that it was perhaps a self-portrait, noting a resemblance between the sitter here and the man portrayed holding a large glass in a black chalk drawing inscribed De Haen, who shares the same circled eyes (fig. 3). The latter is part of a set of portrait sketches of artists—including Dirck van Baburen, Nicolas Régnier, Artemisia Gentileschi and Gerrit van Honthorst—in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, all drawn within framed lines and each inscribed with the name of the sitter; now attributed to Leonaert Bramer (1596–1674), they are datable to about 1620.¹⁰

Grilli posited that if the present work were indeed a self-portrait, the artist depicted himself at the age of about thirty-five, suggesting therefore a dating between 1619 and 1620. More recently, in her entry in the catalogue of the Koelliker Collection of 2007, she revises this to a slightly earlier dating—between 1617 and 1619—when Baburen’s influence on De Haen’s work first becomes apparent. She identifies it more assertively as a self-portrait and heralds it as ‘a masterpiece created by an original and mature artist experimenting with novel forms and techniques’.¹¹ In 2007 Gianni Papi discussed this painting as part of a wider assessment of De Haen’s work, made in the context of the Spanish master Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), who was in Rome by 1606 and soon developed a powerful style, highlighting stylistic elements in his work that derive from Ribera. An important influence on the Dutch painter, Ribera had painted a series of the Five Senses for Cussida, whose patronage De Haen also enjoyed, pointing to connections between the two artists that have yet to be fully elucidated.¹²

We are grateful to John Gash for his comments on this painting, which he considers to be probably a self-portrait by David de Haen datable to c. 1618–20.

¹ Gianni Papi, letter of expertise dated 10 March 2025 and the subject of a forthcoming article.

² Grilli 1997, pl. 20.

³ G. Mancini, Considerazioni sulla Pittura, A. Marucchi (ed.), Rome 1956, vol. I, pp. 259–60.

⁴ Inv. no. 2446F, black chalk, pen, ink and wash on paper, 457 x 330 mm.

⁵ Oil on canvas, 76.2 x 62 cm.

⁶ Grilli 1997, pls 36a, 36b, 37a and 37b.

⁷ Oil on canvas, 280 x 211 cm.; Grilli 1997, pl. 22.

⁸ The catalogue of the exhibition held at Galerie Virginie Pitchal in 1999 states that it was Leonard J. Slatkes who reattributed the painting to David de Haen.

⁹ Oil on canvas, 101.5 x 77 cm.; Franits 2013, pp. 104–5, no. A12, reproduced pl. 12, in colour pl. VI.

¹⁰ Inv. 4060 / 3130; D. Bodart, ‘Quelques peintres caravagistes, d’après les dessins de la collection de Grez’, in Bulletin des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 21, 1972, pp. 95–105; for the portrait of De Haen, see pp. 97–98, reproduced fig. 4; see also A. Lemoine, Nicolas Régnier (alias Niccolò Renieri) ca. 1588–1667; Peintre, collectionneur et marchand d’art, Paris 2007, pp. 30–31, fig. R.101.

¹¹ Grilli 2007, p. 32.

¹² In Papi’s opinion the man depicted playing the lute as he smiles, revealing gums and teeth, in the Allegory of Hearing in the Koelliker Collection, which he regards as an autograph work by Ribera, is particularly comparable to the present work in the naturalism of his expression; Papi 2007, no. 45, reproduced in colour p. 116, pl. 56.