A Hermit at Prayer

A Hermit at Prayer, dated to around 1660 and now at the Wallace Collection in London, is one of Dou's finest late treatments of the devotional hermit subject he had first explored under Rembrandt's influence thirty years earlier. The Wallace Collection, assembled by the fourth Marquess of Hertford and his illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace in the nineteenth century, is one of the great repositories of Dutch cabinet pictures in Britain, and the Dou represents the collection's appetite for technically exceptional fijnschilder work. By 1660 Dou had long since surpassed his master in the refinement of surface finish, and the hermit compositions became showcases for the accumulated techniques of three decades: candlelight or window light modelling aged skin, the complex textures of fur trim, rough cloth, and leather-bound books, and the atmospheric depth that his glazing could build in confined pictorial spaces. The hermit's books and manuscripts carry the dual connotation of scholarly wisdom and devotional practice, uniting the figures of the pious saint and the learned recluse who were, in the seventeenth-century imagination, often collapsed into one.

Mature panel work with Dou's fully developed glazing technique; no brushwork is visible at normal distances, the paint surface approaching the smoothness of enamel. Light models the hermit's aged face with the same sensitivity to aged skin's specific qualities — thin, translucent, following bone structure closely — that characterises all of Dou's elderly figure subjects. Books and fur-trimmed garments receive the still-life precision habitual throughout his career.