Portrait of a man with a letter in his hand

This portrait of a man holding a letter, painted around 1520 and now in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, exemplifies the genre of merchant portraiture that flourished in Antwerp’s commercial culture. The letter identifies the sitter as a man of business and correspondence, connected to the networks of trade and communication that made Antwerp Europe’s commercial hub. Metsys’s late portraits show increasing confidence in psychological characterization. Metsys was the leading portraitist of early sixteenth-century Antwerp, a city then at the center of European commerce and culture.

The sitter’s features are rendered with the precision of a master portraitist, the letter and hands painted with the attention to surface detail characteristic of Netherlandish art. The dark background concentrates attention on the face and gesture.