1666-1669
This, it is said, is a portrait of the artist’s son Titus. In this case he would be in his seventeenth year, as the work is dated 1658. It should be compared with the likeness at the north end of this wall (Number 6) painted three years earlier. “The portraits (of Titus) of 1657 and 1658 show no longer a fresh plump countenance, but haggard, suffering features, dull eyes, and sunken cheeks. It must be avowed that the three years have made a great difference in the boy’s appearance, but perhaps the artist, in these pictures done for his own pleasure, lacked interest in the exactness of the portrait. He may have used the features of his sitters and the effect of light and shade merely as the vehicle for the expression of the mood by which he was dominated at the time, and been careless of other things.
This is one of the pictures which Mr. Altman acquired out of the Maurice Kann Collection. It was shown at the Hudson-Fulton Exhibition in 1909.