Portrait of a Man with an Armillary Sphere

An armillary sphere is a model of the sky made of rings. The bands stand for the circles astronomers drew across the heavens, the equator, the tropics and the belt of the zodiac, set around a small ball for the earth. In the 17th century it was a teaching instrument for astronomy and navigation, and put into a portrait it told visitors that the sitter studied such things, or wished to be seen as a man who did.

Who this man was is not recorded, and neither is the painter. The museum catalogues the canvas as the work of a follower of van Dyck, someone who had absorbed his manner of portraiture, and gives it no date.

It came to Boston from a local family. By about 1905 it belonged to Mrs Bayard Thayer, of a Boston banking family, at her house in Lancaster, Massachusetts. It passed to her daughter, Mrs William Dexter, who gave it to the museum in 1944 in memory of her mother.