This small panel has suffered much; its surface is heavily abraded. Edith Straus purchased the portrait from a sale in 1919 as the work of Cornelis de Vos (c. 1584–1651). De Vos was a painter and dealer in Antwerp. Although known today primarily as a portraitist, he worked in other genres, as well, notably working with Peter Paul Rubens on works for the Joyous Entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp and the Torre de la Parada in the 1630s. Portraits by De Vos often feature bourgeois families or their children in well-appointed settings, painted with a fluid brushstroke influenced by Anthony van Dyck.¹ The simple setting and costume of the Straus panel are uncharacteristic of portraits by De Vos, and the face lacks the carefully observed detail and liveliness of his portraits of children, for example the portrait of his own children in Berlin (fig. 34.1). As the attribution to De Vos seems unlikely and the panel is too damaged to allow confidence in another attribution, the name of the artist remains unknown.

The sitter has always been thought to be a young man, described in the 1919 sale catalogue as “a clear complexioned, open eyed serious lad.”² The present state of the painting makes determining the sitter’s gender difficult, however. The face could be that of a boy, perhaps in his early teens, but the pulled-back hair and red headband are extremely unusual in portraits of young men. Adolescent boys typically wore their hair loose or cropped close to the head.³ Young women, however, often wore their hair pulled back, as in the portrait of a six-year-old girl in Enschede (fig.34.2). No details on the costume remain to inform a decision. The catalogue reproduction shows buttons on the jacket that must have been removed later, probably having been judged a later overpainting. The sitter’s identity is thus, like that of the artist, a mystery, but the styling of the hair strongly suggests she is a young girl.

Portraits of children began appearing in Antwerp around 1550 and continued to be popular until about 1650.⁴ Cornelis de Vos’s sensitive and charming portraits surely did much to promote children’s portraiture in the city and across the southern Netherlands. The small Straus panel is likely the product of this trend, as well as a celebration of familial pride.    

—Michelle Packer