Portrait of a Man Seated by a Table

This portrait has a partner in Berlin. It is one half of a pair, and the other half, a young woman in festive dress beside a table spread with an oriental carpet, is dated 1632 and hangs in the Gemäldegalerie. Pairs like this were often painted when a couple married, and the woman's age and finery point that way here, although neither sitter has been identified.

The two panels were still together in Paris in 1889, when the collection of the industrialist Eugène Secrétan was sold at auction. After that they went separate ways. The man passed through the dealer Charles Sedelmeyer to the banker Rodolphe Kann, whose bequest brought him to the Louvre in 1905.

De Keyser shows him in black with a lace collar and his hat on, seated at a covered table with books and papers, the whole figure fitted onto a panel less than 80 centimetres high. One of the books carries an inscription that nobody has managed to read. Louis Demonts, a Louvre curator in the early 20th century, reported a signature and date on the panel, and neither can be found today.