Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat

Around 1465 Memling settled in Bruges, then one of the richest trading cities in northern Europe, full of Italian and Spanish merchants who wanted their likenesses painted. This is among the first portraits he made there. We do not know who the man in the tall red cap is. What is new is the setting: Memling has painted a fake stone arch around the sitter, as if we were looking at him through a window. That framing device was his own idea, and other painters would borrow it for decades. The calm, closely studied face still owes a great deal to the older masters he learned from, Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden.