Portrait of a girl

Portrait of a girl, painted in 1633 and held at the Landesmuseum Hannover, is a later child portrait by de Vos, executed in the decade of his most ambitious public commissions — the Pompa Introitus cycle and major religious works — yet demonstrating continued private portrait activity. The Landesmuseum Hannover holds an important collection of European Old Masters assembled through the collecting activity of the Welf dynasty and subsequent acquisitions by the Lower Saxony state. The 1633 date is interesting in contrast to his early child portraits: by this stage, de Vos's handling had loosened slightly, with more confident and economical brushwork replacing the painstaking exactness of 1610. A panel support in 1633 for a child portrait suggests an intimate commission where the fine detail of a smaller panel was preferred over the larger canvas format. Child portraits occupied a specific emotional register in Flemish Baroque patronage: parents commissioned them as records of a child's likeness at a specific age, in part as insurance against the high child mortality rates of the period.

Panel support in 1633 is somewhat traditional for this scale, as canvas was by then standard for larger commissions. The smooth panel ground allows fine rendering of the girl's face and dress details. De Vos's mature handling achieves greater economy than his earlier child portraits without sacrificing the physiognomic specificity that gives his work lasting interest.