Portrait of a Man

In 1923 this canvas came up at Christie's in London as a portrait of Anton Triest, and Calouste Gulbenkian bought it. The name did not hold. Triest was bishop of Ghent, and the man here wears no clerical dress at all. Older paperwork calls him Nicolas instead, and the museum's own record now lists the sitter as unidentified.

What the painting does tell you about him is quieter. He carries no sword, which points to a townsman rather than someone of noble rank, and his hand rests on a Spanish leather chair studded with nails. That chair was a fixture of van Dyck's Antwerp studio around 1620. It turns up again beneath the animal painter Frans Snyders in the portrait now at the Frick Collection in New York. Lisbon dates this one to about 1620 or 1621, and some scholars have argued for later, during the years van Dyck spent working in Italy.