Portrait of a Stout Man

This unknown man belongs to one of the first generations in Europe to be painted simply as themselves, without a saint or a coat of arms to explain them. Around 1425 in the cities of the Low Countries, painters like Robert Campin began recording ordinary wealthy citizens with an almost uncomfortable honesty, down to the stubble and the folds of a heavy jaw. Nobody now knows who this sitter was. There are two nearly identical versions of him, one in Berlin and this one in Madrid, which stayed hidden in a Belgian private collection until 1957. He wears the tall dark chaperon, the twisted cloth hat that marked a respectable man of business in his day.