Portrait of a Man

In 1806 this portrait came up for sale in Paris, and the expert who wrote the catalogue, Alexandre Paillet, singled out one thing. The man's hand, he wrote, is so true to life that it seems to come out of the picture. He rests it on the stone sill of a window, which Champaigne painted as a frame inside the frame, and the fingers reach over the edge toward us. Nearly two centuries later Pierre Rosenberg, a former director of the Louvre, chose this hand to illustrate the entry for hand in his personal dictionary of the museum. He praised the fingers, the nails and the wrist, and compared the handling to the early Flemish painters Champaigne could have seen in the Flanders of his youth. The Louvre bought the picture at that 1806 sale. Who the man is remains unknown. Paillet gave him a name that has since been rejected, and a later proposal has not been accepted either. What is certain is lettered at the lower left, Champaigne's signature and the year 1650.