Portrait of a Man

Who this man is has never been settled. For a long time he was taken for the painter Paul de Vos, and the name of Pieter Soutman, a Haarlem painter and engraver who worked with Rubens, has also been attached to him, while a drawing in the city museum of Münster names him on its back as another painter, Jan Boeckhorst. The museum points out a problem with all of these. The canvas was cut down in the 18th century, and it originally showed the man holding a sword, the sign of a gentleman of rank, which none of these painters was. The museum dates it to around 1620 to 1621, before van Dyck left Antwerp for Italy. It came from the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.