Portrait of a Man

The wooden support is 5 mm thick and the wooden type is beech.

The panel consists of two horizontal planks with vertical grains compared to the motif. The panel has no knots, tool tracks or fibre material on the back.

There is fibre material under the ground and it is slightly visible on the surface of the painting seen in side light. The fibre material over the joint is also visible on X-ray.

There are scratches in the ground along all edges of the painting except the top edge. This fact and the fact that the colour on the top edge of the panel goes all the way to the edge of the panel indicates that the panel has been cut.

The ground is applied with brush or scraped on with a kind of iron. The ground doesn’t fill the whole panel but stops 0.7 - 1.0 cm before the edges.

Cross section no. 319b indicates that there could be an isolation layer on top of the ground which consists of some kind of oil, possible mixed with white lead.

The underdrawing is made with a wet medium in a greyish tone. The coloured layers follow the underdrawing except the nose of the woman which is smaller than the underdrawing indicates. Her eyes are also painted with thicker lines than the underdrawing.

The shadows in the background are painted as an orange brown underpaint and on top of this is the translucent green colour layer.

It could look like the flesh paint is underdrawn in a light brown colour.

Oil paint on wood.

The background and the black coat are painted before the flesh paint of the hands. The flesh paint is made by translucent layers in different shades of colour. The shadows in the incarnation are painted in thin translucent layers and at the end the highlights was painted.

The mouth and nose are painted with dark, almost black brushstrokes. The finest black brushstrokes (eyes etc.) are painted wet in wet.

The white shirt is painted at last.

The background is painted with a thick translucent layer on top of the underpaint. There are no visible brushstrokes in the paint besides of the highlights.

The frame is painted black and partly gilded.

Unknown whether the frame is the original.

[Mette Kokkenborg, Statens Museum for Kunst, 2013]

In 1958 the panel was treated for wood worm attacks by the cabinetmaker Topp. The panel was on that occasion planed to the current 5 mm thickness and impregnated with Damar and wax. The wax has filled out lots of the holes from the wood worm attack.

All four edges of the panel are bevelled, since there is paint from the front on to the back in areas where the edges are thinner than 5 mm.

The lower plank has attacked some gauze on the back. The gauze does not cover the joint of the panel.

There are small residues of paint at the back of the panel, maybe from a mixture of white lead that were used to treat the wood worm attack.

On top of the joint of the two planks the wood is further planed to 3 mm. The joint is reinforced with eight mahogany pieces of wood (each 3 x 1.5 cm) which are glued across the joint to the back. Across these wooden pieces, eight other pieces of mahogany are glued on (each 5 x 1.5 cm).

It looks like there at some point were glued three wooden sticks to the back of the panel (each side and the bottom) in a lighter colour, since there are traces of this.

The ground and the translucent colour go right to the edge of the painting on the upper edge, which isn't the case of the three other sides of the painting. This indicates that the painting was originally higher than the current format.

In 2001 the frame was polished with microcrystalline wax.

[Mette Kokkenborg, Statens Museum for Kunst, 2013]