Portrait of a Man

Nobody knows who this man was. He wears a black cap and a heavy fur collar over sleeves of deep red, and his face is painted closely enough to show fine wrinkles and a light growth of beard. Michael Sittow most likely painted him around 1510 in Tallinn, his home town, where he was living again between spells in the service of foreign courts.

The man rests his hands on the lower edge of the picture, as if on a windowsill between him and us. It is a device Sittow brought home from his training in Bruges, where Netherlandish portraitists used it to make a small panel feel like an opening in the wall.

The back of the panel carries the coat of arms of the Liphart family, Baltic German collectors whose manor of Raadi stood just outside Tartu, in what is now Estonia. The portrait came to The Hague in 1946, bought with help from the Rembrandt Association, a Dutch society that raises money for museum purchases.