A Little Boy In A Dress

He was in A Book of Delights, by John Hadfield (London, Edward Hulton, 1957), which I’ve owned since 1961. A dear little serious-faced boy in a dress.

Portrait of Frans Vekemans

The book identifies the painting as Portrait of a Boy, an oil on panel by Cornelis de Vos (1585-1651) in the. Musée Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp. Modern sources all identify it as Portrait of Frans Vekemans (1625, oil on oak panel).

The picture has been reproduced scores of times and is available as a print from several websites. It’s obviously been cleaned and all the reproductions I’ve seen online, including the one on Wikimedia Commons, have a much paler, almost a greenish look—I’d say it’s been overcleaned.

    The little boy was one of a family whose portraits were all painted by Cornelis de Vos, who was a very successful Flemish artist in Antwerp at the period. The museum’s website tells us:

    “Anyone back in 1625 who was able to commission a portrait of his family from a famous Antwerp painter was rich. Joris Vekemans did just that.

    “The short-lived Joris Vekemans (1590-1625) was a wealthy Antwerp businessman. He had himself and his family portrayed in six paintings. Five of these can be seen in the museum.

    “… The portraits belong together in twos: Joris and his wife Maria form one pair. Maria survived her husband by forty years. Then there are the children: the four- or five-year-old Frans and his sisters Elisabeth and Cornelia. Jan is the elder son. The second girl went with Jan, but that work is not in the museum’s collection. The subjects in each pair of portraits adopt the same pose. The backgrounds match and the painter used a similar palette.”

(Museum Mayer van den Bergh. “High-status family”)