Portrait of a Man

In the 1630s smoking was still a fairly new habit in the Dutch Republic. Tobacco had arrived with sailors and soldiers earlier in the century, and by now students and townsmen were smoking long clay pipes while preachers and moralists warned against it. Gerrit Dou painted this young man in Leiden sometime between 1635 and 1640, in an oval barely 19 centimetres tall. He has turned towards us with his elbow on the back of a chair and paused with his pipe. The tobacco in the bowl is still glowing, and a thin thread of smoke twists upward. Dou picked out the pattern of gold braid on his clothes and the tiny reflections in his eyes. For a long time the picture was taken for a self-portrait. The National Gallery now treats it as a tronie, the Dutch term for a study of a type or character rather than a likeness of a particular sitter. The gallery bought it in 1844 for 125 guineas.