A Man Wearing a Green Coat

The man in the green coat adds another color option to Carlevarijs's figure repertoire for populating his vedute's crowd scenes. The variety of coat colors across his studies — red, yellow, green, white, dark blue, black — reflects his understanding of how chromatic variety across a crowd prevented the visual monotony that plagued painters who populated their scenes with similarly dressed figures. Carlevarijs's approach to staffage was essentially modular: by building a library of individual figure types in varied costumes, he could assemble them into crowd scenes of convincing diversity without the need to invent new figures for each painting.

The green coat is painted with rich, warm-toned pigment that suggests a quality garment. The figure's stance and the fall of the coat are captured with Carlevarijs's characteristic quick, confident brushwork.