ABOUT THE SITTER:

The sitter is depicted looking directly at the viewer with a thoughtful expression, this is a sensitive portrait giving a real insight into his character as well as the turbulent and obscure times of that period in English History.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Gerard Soest was born in Soest, Westphalia, in the early part of the first decade of the seventeenth century, circa 1601/1602 (he was noted by Charles Beale as “neare 80 years old when he died.)

Soest may have come to England before the restoration and was certainly there by 1650. His studio was first near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then in Southampton Buildings, north of the Strand.

His stablished reputation as an admirable master who depicted truth and nature, bold and highly finished portraits generally of male sitters gained him fame for His taste being too Dutch and ungraceful, and his humour too rough to please the softer sex. The gentle manners of Sir Peter Lely carried them all from his competitor. Soest who was capricious, slovenly and covetous, often went to the door himself, and if he was not in a humour to draw those who came to sit he would say his master wasn’t in the house as if he was a servant.

His draperies were often of satin, in which he imitated the manner of ter Borch. He was enlisted among the rivals of Sir Peter Lely and his work was chiefly on a head-and-shoulders scale; otherwise, he seems to have specialized in three-quarter-length portraits, full lengths being less common. Soest also painted allegorical works, in some of which he indulged his taste for the erotic. He died in London on 11 February 1681.