Man in plumed beret

A bearded man in a great slashed beret with a white plume turns toward us. Forgotten in a corner of a Danish castle, he was rediscovered in 1911, and scholars have argued over his maker ever since.

The story behind the painting

Man in a Plumed Beret is a portrait in oil on canvas dated around 1661, now in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. It had been in the Fredensborg Castle collection, documented there in 1814 and probably since 1775, and entered the national collection in 1890. In 1911 Karl Madsen, a Rembrandt scholar and director of the museum, found it in a remote corner of Fredensborg Castle, where it had been put in temporary storage.

What to look for

In 1914 Hofstede de Groot described it as A Crusader: a man turned to the right but looking at the viewer, wearing a large slashed head-dress with a white plume and a plain costume with a Maltese cross on the right shoulder, shown half-length. He noted that Madsen dated it to about 1655, which differs from the c. 1661 date given today. The canvas measures about 68.5 by 55.5 cm.

Meaning and intent

Recent studies see it as an oil sketch for The Knight with the Falcon in Sweden, and the Swedish gallery agrees. It notes that the same face appears in several works from the 1650s and 1660s, including Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, and that in this sketch the same model wears similar headgear but a red cloak. The same face also appears in A Bearded Man in a Cap in London and a 1661 Portrait of a Bearded Man in the Hermitage.

Legacy

Despite Madsen's enthusiasm and Hofstede de Groot's attribution, Horst Gerson questioned the painting and rejected it as a Rembrandt in 1969. Its place in Rembrandt's work therefore rests on later research linking it to The Knight with the Falcon. Today the Statens Museum for Kunst keeps it in Copenhagen, more than two centuries after it was first recorded in the Danish royal palaces, where it may have hung since 1775.