Portrait of a man with narcissus and a hyacinth.

This unusual portrait, now in the National Museum in Warsaw, shows a man holding narcissus and hyacinth flowers — a combination whose symbolic resonance in mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp would have been immediately legible to a humanist audience. Narcissus carried associations with self-love and mortality, while hyacinth was linked to grief and Apollo's fatal attachment. Whether the sitter himself chose these flowers as a personal emblem, a memento mori reference, or a play on his name is unknown, but the iconographic specificity distinguishes this work from conventional court portraiture. Painted around 1550, the work belongs to Mor's period in Antwerp before his regular Spanish employment, when he was serving a wider range of humanist merchant and patrician clients whose cultural ambitions extended beyond dynastic display.

The canvas ground is smoothly prepared, and the flowers are painted with the same precision Brueghel later applied to botanical detail — each petal and stamen individually worked. The warm flesh of the face contrasts with the cooler whites and purples of the flowers, drawing the eye between face and object in the intended contemplative exchange. Mor's characteristic dark ground reinforces the almost jewel-like brightness of the narcissus petals.