Portrait of a young prince - attributed to Justus Sustermans (1597; 1681

Justus Sustermans (1597; 1681) attributed. Portrait of a young prince

Canvas of 65 cm by 54 cm
Old frame of 77 cm by 66 cm

This superb portrait of a young prince is made in a fake oval. The young boy is very richly dressed in a shirt embroidered with silver thread, in the background heavy red velvet curtains. This young boy is most certainly a child of one of the great Italian families for whom Justus Sustermans painted a lot (the Colonna, d'Este, Farnese…)

Justus Sustermans (1597; 1681)

First pupil of Willem de Vos in Antwerp (1609), then Frans II Pourbus in Paris (1616), he lived in Florence from 1619, called by the Grand Duke Cosimo II. He joins a group of Parisian upholsterers, summoned to Florence by Cosimo II de Medici for the Medici Tapestry. He then settled in the Tuscan Grand Duchy and began working there as a portraitist in the service of the Medici and the Florentine aristocracy. In 1620 he became court painter and the official artist of the last Medici, painting for the grand-ducal family (under the reigns of Cosimo II, Ferdinand II and Cosimo III) and the members of the Florentine court dozens of official portraits , which did not prevent him from traveling in the meantime and staying in Pisa, Milan, Parma, Modena, Ferrara and Vienna (1622). Among his many portraits, most of which remained in Italy (Florence, Lucca, Parma), let us mention the incomparable series of Florence (Pitti), the portrait of Galileo (Uffizi), the 2 versions of that of Christine of Lorraine, large - Duchess of Tuscany (Brussels, M. R. B. A.; Rome, G. N., Gal. Corsini), that of Vittoria della Rovere (Rome, id.). The style of Sustermans derives, at first, from the type of court portraiture of Pourbus and the Flemings, but the artist is enriched during his long career by inflections borrowed from the Florentine milieu (Empoli, Giovanni da San Giovanni, Volterrano Rubens, who was the painter's friend, Van Dyck and Velázquez, whose works Sustermans was able to see in Rome, finally colored the style of his maturity, after 1650, completing to give his style ease and vigor. workshop that he had to maintain will lead to many followers and replicas. One can see a set in a series of Portraits of anonymous ladies, Fouques donation to the Douai museum. He has produced a considerable body of work that spans more than sixty years in which he represents portraits, but also subjects of historical or religious inspiration.All Florentine society, princes, servants, ecclesiastics, soldiers, scholars, members of the greatest Italian families: Barberini, Colonna, Corsini, d'Este, Farnese, Pamphili. None of his works being signed, they are either attributed, or from his workshop.