Salomon Koninck

Private collection, Los Angeles;

By whom anonymously sold ("Property from a Private Collection, Studio City, California"), Los Angeles, Andrew Jones, 14 December 2023, lot 559 (as Manner of Peter Paul Rubens);

Where acquired by the present collector.

This depiction of an elderly priest or rabbi is an example of Salomon Koninck’s tronies, a popular genre of character studies in seventeenth-century Holland. Unbeholden to the formalities of traditional portraiture, these bust- or half-length figure paintings granted artists creative freedom to demonstrate their painterly bravura and to depict expressions, unusual facial types, and fanciful costumes.

Koninck’s talent for rendering textures and sumptuous materials is apparent in the luminous fabric of the man’s decorative prayer shawl, enriched with gold-thread embroidery depicting a haloed saint. Rembrandt’s influence looms large in Koninck's oeuvre and is especially evident here in the restrained palette and powerful use of chiaroscuro.

This painting relates to a second, larger version in the Earl of Mansfield’s collection. In that composition, the old man gazes downward into the pages of a large, leather-bound book (perhaps a religious text) sprawled across his lap.¹

¹ Reproduced in Dutch Art and Scotland: A Reflection of Taste, exhibition catalogue, cat. no. 28.