Portrait of a Man

The Portrait of a Man dated 1800 and held in the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio presents a puzzling attribution: Mengs died in 1779, more than twenty years before this date. Either the date is incorrect, the attribution is questioned, or the painting is by a follower working in his manner. The Musée Fesch — assembled by Napoleon's uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, who was an avid and somewhat indiscriminate collector of Italian paintings — contains several works whose attributions were established in the nineteenth century under conditions less rigorous than modern scholarship requires. A portrait attributed to Mengs bearing an impossible date is therefore a candidate for reattribution to a follower, a later copyist, or possibly a misidentification of the sitter rather than a dating of the painting.

Technical examination of this canvas would be particularly valuable given the problematic date: paint analysis, ground layer composition, and canvas preparation could clarify whether the work is consistent with Mengs's materials and methods or whether it was produced later by someone working in his established manner.