Portrait of a gentleman, half-length, in a painted oval

This portrait represents a new addition to the oeuvre of Gerard ter Borch. It closely resembles portraits that Ter Borch produced in the 1660s for citizens of Deventer in the province of Overijssel (see A.M. Kettering, 'Gerard ter Borch's Portraits for the Deventer Elite,' Simiolus, vol. 27, no. 1/2, 1999, pp. 46-69). In 1667, Ter Borch painted a group portrait of the Deventer Town Council (S.J. Gudlaugsson, Gerard ter Borch, The Hague, 1959-1960, I, pp. 194-195, no. 205, II, fig. 205) as well as several individual portraits of some of its members. One such work, depicting Cornelis Vos, is analogous to the present portrait in format (Manchester Art Gallery, inv. no. 1979.446). Moreover, the visage of the sitter is similar to that of Arent Arents, the figure at far right in the Deventer picture.

The present work comes from the H.L. Bischoffsheim collection and was sold in his sale at Christie's, London, 7 May 1926 (lot 50) as the work of Roelof Koets (1592[?]-1655), a pupil of Ter Borch. It was subsequently sold as Ter Borch in 1926 by Frederik Muller to Count Gerard Joseph Emile d'Aquin, whose purchase is recorded with the Portrait of a Man by Thomas de Keyser sold in these rooms on 25 January 2012 and now belonging to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. We are grateful to Fred Meijer of the RKD in The Hague for confirming the attribution to Ter Borch based on firsthand examination (26 January 2012).