Search results

Start typing

Detail of a still life showing a laded table
Dutch Art

The Royal Collection has one of the finest holdings of seventeenth century Dutch paintings in the world

GABRIEL METSU (LEIDEN 1629-AMSTERDAM 1667)

A Self-Portrait

c.1655-8

RCIN 405943

Here the artist depicts himself within a stone window frame, a device he learned from his teacher, Gerrit Dou. Metsu presents himself as an intellectual painter in the mainstream Italianate tradition, rather than as a Dutch craftsman. He is richly dressed to suggest that painting is a 'Liberal Art' appropriate for gentlemen. That he holds a piece of chalk rather than a brush refers to disegno, or invention – the intellectual element of painting. He is surrounded by works of art with elevated subjects: a sculpted head of a classical figure and a print after Gerard Seghers's Christ at the Column. These are works which inform Metsu's own art. They are Flemish and somewhat in the style of Sir Peter Paul Rubens - the most ambitious and Italianate artist from the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. 


    The income from your ticket contributes directly to The Royal Collection Trust, a registered charity. The aims of The Royal Collection Trust are the care and conservation of the Royal Collection, and the promotion of access and enjoyment through exhibitions, publications, loans and educational activities.