Workshop of Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen

For a long time this small panel was taken for a self-portrait. A man in a black cap with earflaps and a fur-trimmed gown looks out beside a painted slip of paper, seemingly pinned to the wall, with a monogram and the date 1533. The sitter is Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen, the Amsterdam painter and woodcut designer, in old age.

Technical study changed the label. The paint is smoother than in his documented pictures and rich in lead white, and the drawing underneath is mechanical, the way a copyist transfers an outline. The Rijksmuseum now considers it probably a copy after a lost original from his workshop, and names his grandson Cornelis Anthonisz, a painter and mapmaker, as a possible author.

A related likeness turns up in a picture from about 1550 by his son Dirck Jacobsz, now in the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, which shows Jacob Cornelisz painting a portrait of his wife. The Rijksmuseum bought this panel in 1887 from the London dealer A. Myers.