Self-portrait

Artist Ferdinand Bol (Dutch, 1616-1680)

Place of OriginNetherlands

Date1647

DimensionsH: 39 5/8 in. (100.6 cm); W: 35 1/16 in. (89.1 cm)

MediumOil on canvas

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineGift of George P. MacNichol, Jr.

Object number

1980.1347

Not on View

Collections

Paintings

Published ReferencesBlankert, Albert, Ferdinand Bol 1616-1680, een leerling van Rembrandt, Ph.D. thesis, University of Utrecht, 1976, no. A 63.

"News from the world of art," Apollo, vol. 114, no. 237, Nov. 1981, p. 347.

Blankert, Albert, Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680), Rembrandt's Pupil, Doornspijk, 1982, no. 61, plate 61, p. 118.

White, Christopher, ed., Rembrandt by himself, The Hague, 1999, p. 234, fig. 87c.

Bomford, David, et al, Rembrandt: Art in the Making, London, National Gallery, 2006, p. 121, fig. 116, p. 122.

Exhibition HistoryAnn Arbor, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Works of Art Selected from Collectors of Alumni of the University of Michigan, 1967, no. 8, repr.

Toledo Museum of Art, The Unseen Art of TMA: What's in the Vaults and Why?, September 12, 2004-January 2, 2005 (no catalogue or checklist).

Label TextA student and assistant of Rembrandt’s from the early 1630s to about 1642, Ferdinand Bol became a successful portraitist working in Amsterdam. This self-portrait, painted when Bol was about 31, shows the direct influence of his famous teacher. Bol based his pose and composition on the 1639 etched self-portrait (see illustration) and a 1640 painted self-portrait by Rembrandt, which Rembrandt himself based on portraits by Italian Renaissance artists Raphael and Titian. Bol, like Rembrandt, depicts himself dressed in Renaissance finery (which was already a century out of fashion) in order to associate himself both with the social status of an Italian Renaissance courtier and with the famous and revered artists of that earlier era.