Shown from the chest up, a light-skinned man with a wrinkled face and a silvery gray beard and hair gazes into the distance in this oval portrait painting. His chest is angled to our right but he turns his head to look off over his other shoulder, to our left. His slate-blue eyes are a little sunken and lined with wrinkles. Shading marks the hollows of the temple and cheek we can see. His thin lips are closed and framed by his curly mustache and beard. A dark, mahogany-brown cap is pushed back on his head, and his brown jacket has gold-colored buttons down the front. The collar of a cream-colored shirt shows through at the neckline. The background is dark olive green. The artist signed the work near the man’s shoulder, to our right: “GDOV.”

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   In this intimate portrait, a bearded man with piercing eyes gazes to his right, his weathered face brightly illuminated against his dark beret. Bright accents enliven his eyes and help model his forehead and cheek bones, while similar highlights define the folds of his open shirt and articulate the strands of his grey hair. Dou's expressive brushwork and detailed handling of paint bring an extraordinary vigor and animation to this wonderful image. This work was once believed to represent Dou's father—a romantic notion that has since been proven wrong by a confirmed image of him with a darker beard and rounder face.

   Dou's small oval panel is an outstanding example of a tronie, a type of figure study popular among Dutch artists. Among them, Rembrandt van Rijn, Dou's teacher, made many of these studes in the early to mid-17th century. Dou made tronies of both young and old models, though he favored the old, because their time-worn faces seemed to convey notions of wisdom and experience. Tronies were often sold as independent works, but they were also commonly used by artists as studies for their own genre and history paintings.

 

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