Portrait of a Boy, Aged Six

The inscription on this panel says the boy was six years old in 1654, the year he sat for Jan de Bray in Haarlem. Nobody knows who he was. He wears the sober black of a grown man, a plain white collar tied with cords that end in woolly tassels, and he holds a broad-brimmed hat in his left hand as if he had just doffed it politely. The coloured ribbons on the hat look playful, though adult men wore them too.

De Bray set the viewpoint low, so the boy looks down at us and seems older than his years. His closed, unsmiling mouth can read as sad today, yet in a time when laughing in a portrait was thought improper it simply showed good manners. The panel belonged to Anton Philips, co-founder of the Philips company in Eindhoven, before the Mauritshuis bought it in 1932.