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Portraits of Unknown Sitters in Old Master Painting
History has kept the faces and lost the names. Most Old Master portraits hanging in the world's museums carry a label that says nothing more than Portrait of a Man, and the same is true of almost every antique portrait on the market. The name went missing for administrative reasons. The painting did not change.
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| In any museum in the world | |||
| Walk the Old Master rooms and read the labels. | |||
| Portrait of a Man | Portrait of a Lady | Marie Antoinette | Head of a Young Girl |
| Portrait of a Gentleman | Portrait of a Lady | Portrait of a Boy | Portrait of a Man |
| All eight were painted by trained hands. Only one kept its paperwork. | |||
Four ordinary accidents
How an Antique Portrait Loses Its Sitter |
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| A label falls off | An estate is split | A family line ends | A war or a fire |
| the paper on the stretcher, gone in one move | the pictures go three ways, the inventory stays with one heir | nobody is left who recognises the face | the archive burns, the canvas survives |
For every king there were thousands of magistrates, merchants, officers, doctors and their wives who sat for the same painters, wore the same fashions and paid the same money to be recorded in oil. Even in the museums, many sitters were obscure in their own lifetime. Nattier's Madame de La Porte is remembered today because Nattier painted her, and for no other reason.
Remove the label
What the Label Carried, What the Canvas Carries |
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| What the label carried | What the canvas carries |
| A name A title A biography A story |
The hand that painted it The state of the canvas The presence of the face Two or three centuries of age |
| Everything in the left column left with the paperwork. Everything in the right column is still on the wall. | |
This is what a collector buys when a sitter has no name. Not a lesser oil painting, but the same painting without its biography. And a named sitter belongs to history, while an unknown one belongs to whoever is standing in front of the canvas.
Four things to look at
Buying an Antique Portrait of an Unknown Sitter |
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| 1 | The face | In any period workshop the face went to the most skilled hand available. If the face is alive, the painting is good. Fabric and background could be delegated. Presence could not. |
| 2 | The hands and the lace | The technical proving grounds of the portraitist. Confident hands and convincing lace almost always mean a fully trained professional rather than a provincial imitator. |
| 3 | The clothes, for a date | Wigs, collars and dress place a portrait within a decade or two, which is often closer than any document would have. Costume dates a canvas more reliably than a signature. |
| 4 | The condition, honestly | Old relining and small restorations are normal in oil paintings of this age. What matters is that the face reads well and the surface is stable. |
The same four questions work on a nineteenth-century canvas as on an eighteenth. The premium on named sitters did not stop at the Revolution, and neither did the number of people who sat for a portrait and were forgotten by their grandchildren.
| → | The next questionHow do you date a portrait when nothing on it is written?By the wig, the dress and the format, which place a canvas within twenty years. |
Sources. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Palace of Versailles, and published reference works on European portraiture.
