Portrait of a Surgeon

Inscription: Dated and inscribed: (left) siet om of swijcht (Be cautious or keep silent); (right, on column) Ao. 1[5]69. / siet om of swijcht / ÆTs. 47.

Bonomi–Cerada, Milan (until 1895; sold to Davis in May 1895); Theodore M. Davis, Newport, R.I. (1895–d. 1915; his estate, on loan to The Met, 1915–30)

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Winter 1903–4, no catalogue? (lent by Theodore Davis) [see Chalfin 1903].

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," September 22, 1998–February 21, 1999, no. 44.

Brunswick, Me. Bowdoin College Museum of Art. "The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe," June 24–November 26, 2017, unnumbered cat. (colorpl. 44).

P. C[halfin]. "Pictures in the Fourth Gallery." Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 1 (November 1903), p. 31, refers to this painting as a Dutch, or perhaps German, portrait of an anatomist.

Harry B. Wehle and Margaretta Salinger. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Catalogue of Early Flemish, Dutch and German Paintings. New York, 1947, p. 152, ill., catalogue it as the work of an Unknown Dutch Painter, noting that the inscription and workmanship indicate that both subject and painter are Dutch; comment that the instrument in the subject's left hand is very like one "used by surgeons in the seventeenth century, and probably earlier too, for 'cautery' of the skull (J. Scultetus, The Chyrurgeon's Store-House, 1674, p. 106, pl. 30)".

Millia Davenport. The Book of Costume. New York, 1948, vol. 1, p. 420, no. 1116, ill. (cropped).

Josephine L. Allen and Elizabeth E. Gardner. A Concise Catalogue of the European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1954, p. 32.

Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 274, ill.

Véronique Sintobin in From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ed. Maryan W. Ainsworth and Keith Christiansen. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1998, pp. 202–03, no. 44, ill. (color), compares it to the production of Corneille de Lyon who specialized in small–scale paintings in which "the sensitively modeled heads of sitters are invariably viewed against green backgrounds".

Stephen Perkinson. The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe. Exh. cat., Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Brunswick, Me., 2017, pp. 67, 204, colorpl. 44.