Self-portrait of Philips Koninck (1619-1688)

We are not even certain of the year. The catalogue reads 1661, the scholar Horst Gerson read it as 1667, and the date once inscribed on the canvas has faded past reading. What is certain is the sitter, Philips Koninck, a Dutch painter known less for faces than for wide, low-horizon views of the flat country around Amsterdam. Here he turns the brush on himself. The portrait travelled south long after his death. Cosimo the Third, Grand Duke of Tuscany, acquired it in 1707 for the Medici collection of artists' self-portraits, and had it moved into the ducal wardrobe rooms that February. A landscape specialist wanted for a gallery of painters' faces says something about how far his name had carried, from the Amsterdam flats all the way to Florence.