Attributed to Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) - Study of an old woman's head, looking upwards to her left, wearing a white bonnet Oil on paper, laid onto panel 33.5 x 27.5 cm. (13 1/4 x 10 3/4 in) Provenance: Private collection, Scotland. The practice of painting a head study, or tronie, that would later be used as a model for larger compositions was a traditional working method in Flemish painting that was undertaken by Frans Floris (1516-1570) and his studio, through to Rubens, Van Dyck and Jordaens in the early 17th Century and beyond. These head studies were not necessarily intended as a portrait in their own right, but as a character head that could be copied or employed by the artist and his studio where appropriate. Julius Held writes that 'Rubens reintroduced the practice, encouraged perhaps by what he had seen of Italian studio methods', and that 'the greatest number of studies or heads done by [Rubens] belong to the period before 1620'.[1] Jacob Jordaens was known to have employed the same working method of painting head studies that Rubens had reintroduced, and like Rubens these studies differed from Frans Floris, in that they were painted from life. When discussing Jordaens's St Peter finding the tribute money (Copenhagen), D'Hulst writes: 'No painting by Jordaens illustrates better the significant use he made of studies of heads. So many can be recognised that it can almost be concluded that at this period he never painted a head on a canvas without using a model, whether a study in oils or a drawing.' [2] Like the head studies that Jordaens executed for St Peter finding the tribute money, the present tronie also appears to potentially be a study for a painting, the present location unknown, that was traditionally accepted as being by Jacob Jordaens. The possible finished painting, like the head study, is not in any of the literature of the last fifty to one-hundred years (as far as we are aware), and was possibly not known by D'Hulst. The Witt library, Courtauld Institute, holds an image of the finished painting, an oil on panel (see no. B/6266 ), that was once part of a private Scottish collection. The oil on panel appears to employ the present head study in a larger, more fully worked and finished painting, but while the head study appears to directly relate to this lost work, it is more likely that the study and sitter were used by Jordaens on several occasions and in various compositions. Similar types of heads of old women appear throughout Jordaens's body of work, and similar characters can be spotted in his paintings, including The Bean King (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel), amongst others. One of the closest works by Jordaens that is can comparable to the present is a drawing, Head of an old woman, in left profile, held in the Statens Museum for Kunst (see R.-A. D'Hulst, Jordaen's drawings, 4 vol., 1974, no. A52, fig. 59, pp.146-147). The drawing, long accepted as by Jordaens, depicts the same character and physiognomy of the old lady, and furthermore both works capture a degree of compassion and reverence towards the sitter. The painting Two Views of an Old Woman's Head , held in the Museé des beaux-arts, Nancy, (inv. no. 91) is also an interesting comparison for the present study, but while the sitter is of the same type, she appears fuller in the face, and more likely a painting similar in subject and type but not as close in execution. ' [St Peter finding the tribute money] presents a unique opportunity to illustrate how extensively Jordaens made use of studies in the 1620s, so that his work of this period are related not only by their style but by the ever-recurring human and animal types based on studies kept in the studio.' [3] [1] Julius S. Held, The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens , 1980, p.597 [2] R.-A. D'Hulst, Jacob Jordaens, translated from the Dutch by P.S. Falla, 1987, p.114 [3] Ibid, p.118
