Name: JOHANNES CORNELISZ. VERSPRONCK (HAARLEM 1600-1662)
Brand: Portrait of a Gentleman, half-length, wearing a black costume with a white lace collar and a black hat
Price: 55000.00 GBP
Availability: OutOfStock

JOHANNES CORNELISZ. VERSPRONCK (HAARLEM 1600-1662)
Portrait of a Gentleman, half-length, wearing a black costume with a white lace collar and a black hat
oil on canvas
33 x 26¹⁄₂ in. (83.8 x 67.3 cm.)

with Agnew's, London, by 1913.
with D. A. Hoogendijk & Co., Amsterdam, and Koetser & Ascher, London, owned jointly by 1940, from whom purchased by,
Herman Goedring, (inv. no. RM 668), by whom given in exchange for a fake Vermeer in 1944 to,
‘Kunsthandel voorheen J. Goudstikker NV’, Alois Miedl, inv. no. H 88, by whom sold in 1944 to the following,
Sonderauftrag Linz for Fl. 60,000 (Linz no. 3506), from where recovered by,
The Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section, and transferred to the Munich Central Collecting Point, 8 July 1945 (Munich no. 3055), from where transferred to Amsterdam, 15 February 1946 and returned to,
D. A. Hoogendijk, Amsterdam.
Anonymous sale [Property of a Family Collection] Christie's, New York, 12 January 1994, lot 8.
The Ors-Doron Sebag Art Collection, Tel Aviv; Christie's, New York, 27 January 2000, lot 171, where acquired by the present owner.

'1938 Annual', supplement to the Art News, 26 March 1938, XXXIV, p. 137, illustrated.
W. Bernt, Die Niederländischen Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts, 1948, III, no. 929, illustrated.
R. Ekkart, Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck: Leven en Werken Van Een Haarlems Portretschilder Uit de 17-De Eeuw, Haarlem, 1979, pp. 47, 98 and 170, no. 53, illustrated.
N.H. Yeide, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: The Hermann Goering Collection, Dallas, 2009, pp. 106 and 479, no. A675, with the incorrect illustration.

Haarlem, Fras Hals Museum, Johannes Cornelisz. Verspronck, 1979, no. 53.

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Lot Essay

Following in the tradition of the swagger portrait, Verspronck here places his sitter in a twisting pose reminiscent of Frans Hals’ 1645 Portrait of Willem Coymans (Washington, National Gallery of Art), sharing elements of respectable Dutch attire, such as the wide-brimmed black hat and flat lace collar. Yet Verspronck rarely tried to emulate Hals' loose brushwork, favouring a far smoother, more illusionistic application of paint than the artist, his main rival for portrait commissions in Haarlem. Verspronck first studied with his father, the painter Cornelis Engelsz. (1575-1650), and may also have spent time in Hals' studio before entering the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke in 1632. His work from the 1630s clearly showed Hals’ influence in his sitter’s poses, which displayed a jauntiness that countered the sombre hues of contemporary fashion. As was usual in Dutch dress of this period, the overall intended impression here was one of luxury, with the foreshortening of the figure’s arms frequently used by the artist to conform to a desired silhouette rather than anatomical correctness. Rudi Ekkart dated the present work to circa 1643-45 (op. cit.), during Verspronck’s most prolific period, with the design similar to his Portrait of a Man of 1645 (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Portrait of a Man dated 1643 (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts).