The somewhat dark and restrained half-length portrait shows an elderly gentleman with a ruddy and rugged face. In places the brushwork of this conscientiously executed painting is meticulous in rather a clumsy, naive way.
Osvald Sirén had discussed the portrait with Karl Madsen in Florence. Madsen regarded the painting as the work of the portrait painter Thomas de Keyser from Amsterdam. In the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Osvald Sirén had seen another version of the portrait which in his opinion was wrongly attributed to Abraham de Vries. In Palazzo Piccolomini in Siena, he found a third portrait with the same subject. According to the attendant, the painting represented a member of the Piccolomini family. After further examination, Sirén suggested that the sitter might have been Prince Octavio Piccolomini (1599-1656) but the matter was never finally cleared up.
In 1968, Karla Langedijk published an article on the portrait in the Palazzo Pitti. She regarded it as the work of Jan van Ravesteyn and supposed that it represented a Dutch scholar, Daniel Heinsius, a sometime envoy of Queen Christina. R.E.O. Ekkart accepted the attribution to Revesteyn in 1974 but did not believe that the portrait represented Heinsius. In the Palazzo Pitti portrait, the old gentleman is depicted from the knees up, standing next to a table covered by an oriental carpet. The half-length in the Sinebrychoff Collection is a reduced version of the painting in the Palazzo Pitti, most probably painted in the Ravesteyn studio approximately at the same time.
Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn Portrait of a man