Portrait of Lieutenant-Admiral Cornelis Tromp in Roman Costume

Cornelis Tromp first went to sea as a boy with his father, the famous admiral Maarten Tromp. In 1666 a quarrel with his commander, Michiel de Ruyter, cost him his post, and only in 1673, during the Third Anglo-Dutch War, was he taken back. In this small panel he appears as a Roman commander, in a breastplate and a heavy orange cloak, drawing his sword on a shore while a sea battle goes on in the distance. The initials on the panel were once read as those of the painter Abraham Willaerts, which the museum now rejects. For a Roman costume the sword is an odd choice. It is a curved Persian sabre that the admiral really owned, with a grip of walrus ivory, and it survives in the same display case of the museum's armory as the portrait.