Portret van Willem Nolen, hoogleraar Geneeskunde te Leiden

Jan Veth was a Dutch painter and critic, a significant figure in late nineteenth-century Dutch art as both a portraitist and as an advocate for the renewal of Dutch painting through engagement with Symbolism and international modernism. His 1901 portrait of Willem Nolen, professor of medicine at Leiden, was commissioned for the university's portrait gallery as a companion to the Israëls portrait of Rosenstein. Veth's own cultural authority as a critic and his social connections within Dutch intellectual life made him a natural choice for such institutional portrait commissions alongside the more widely celebrated Israëls. The two portraits together represent the range of Dutch portraiture available to a Dutch university in 1901.

Veth brings the thoughtful, psychologically searching quality of his best portrait work to this academic commission, the professor's face rendered with the patient observation and careful tonal modeling that distinguished his portraiture from the more painterly fluency of Israëls. The academic setting is suggested through costume and bearing rather than through detailed background description.