Portrait of Caspar van Kinschot (1622-1649)

This portrait is 11 centimetres tall and painted on a sheet of copper, small enough to go into a travelling chest, and that was the point. Around 1646 and 1647 Gerard ter Borch was in the German city of Munster, where envoys from across Europe were negotiating an end to years of war, and he painted members of the Dutch delegation at this size so their likenesses could travel home to The Hague without trouble. Caspar van Kinschot was the youngest of them, in his mid-twenties. Ter Borch lets you see it in the fashionable long hair and the broad collar. The young envoy did not have long. Van Kinschot died in 1649, in his late twenties, the year after the peace was sworn. The little copper was later in the Van Kinschot collection in Leiden, and a private owner has lent it to the Mauritshuis since 1975.