Portrait of an Unknown Man

This small panel, barely a hand's span across, comes from early in the painter's career, around 1512, not long after Joos van Cleve had settled in Antwerp. The man who sits for it is unnamed, turned slightly, watching the room with a steady, unhurried look. In the Uffizi it hangs among the works of Dürer and the German school, a Netherlandish face filed with its neighbours from across the Rhine, and that is where visitors tend to come upon it. The year it was made, Antwerp was turning into the trading capital of northern Europe, and a portrait this modest in size was the kind of thing a rising merchant could afford to sit for. It is painted on wood, about 31 centimetres tall.