Portrait of a Man

This artist has paid great attention to detail, right down to the individual strands of fur in the trim of the sitter’s gown. The man’s drooping left eye, furrowed brow and downturned mouth make his face distinctive, though his identity is yet to be discovered. He was certainly a man of considerable status. The black fabric in which he is almost entirely clothed was notoriously difficult to dye and highly coveted, with the most fashionable outfits consisting entirely of black. The sitter's ensemble can be compared to that worn by the Elizabethan statesperson Nicholas Bacon (1510-79) in his portraits of the 1570s in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

When the founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery – the art dealer Noel Desenfans (1741-1807) and the artist Francis Bourgeois (1753-1811) – acquired this painting in the 1790s, they thought it was by the German-born, sixteenth-century artist Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543). Holbein spent two periods of his life in England (1526-8) and (1532-43), and was celebrated on British shores for his distinctive portraits of the Tudor royal family. This attribution has since been rejected and this mysterious portrait is assigned to an as yet unknown artist of the British School.