Portrait of a boy with a large ruff

Portrait of a boy with a large ruff at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg is an early work by Wilhelm Leibl, dating from 1869 when the German realist was barely twenty-six and still absorbing influences from old master portraiture. The large ruff — a starched, pleated collar fashionable in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries — appears here either as a costume piece or as a reference to the tradition of Dutch and Flemish portraiture Leibl had studied closely. The boy's careful, contained expression and the formality of the costume sit in interesting tension with the directness of Leibl's observational approach.

The ruff's intricate starched folds presented a considerable technical challenge that Leibl meets with meticulous rendering of the fine linen — each fold modeled with the precision that would become his trademark. The face above is painted with the concentrated attention to observed reality that defined his approach from the beginning of his career.