Portrait of a Man with an Arrow
Shown from the shoulders up, a man with peachy skin looks off to our left as he holds the feathered end of an arrow up in a hand resting along the bottom edge of this vertical portrait painting. Shown against a marine-blue background, he looks into the distance with hazel eyes under bushy eyebrows. He has a long, bumped nose, and his full, pale pink lips are closed. His round cheeks are tinged with pink, and there is a hint of a five-o-clock shadow around his mouth and jawline. Chestnut-brown, curly hair hangs to the base of his neck, and wispy curls fall across his forehead from under his tall, chocolate-brown cap. The cap has a small gold pin high over the ear we can see. The man wears a garnet-red jacket with a black collar over a white collarless shirt decorated with five black, narrow bands below the neckline. The fingers of his right hand, to our left, rest with the fingertips braced along on the bottom edge of the painting, as if along a ledge. He pinches the shaft of an arrow with his index finger and thumb, so we see the sienna-brown feathers. He wears a gold ring embedded with a small blue gem near the first knuckle of his ring finger.
Details
- Palette
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- Medium
- oil on panel
- Dimensions
- painted surface: 31.3 x 25.1 cm (12 5/16 x 9 7/8 in.) overall (panel): 31.9 x 25.8 cm (12 9/16 x 10 3/16 in.) framed: 40.2 x 32.7 x 6.4 cm (15 13/16 x 12 7/8 x 2 1/2 in.)
- Department
- CNE-R
- Holding institution
- National Gallery of Art
- Image provider
- national-gallery-of-art
- License
- CC0-1.0
- Credit
- Andrew W. Mellon Collection
Art Genome Taxonomy
8 tags
Subject Matter
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Portrait Both · 99%
The title identifies the work as a portrait, and the image clearly presents a single male sitter in a tightly framed portrait composition.
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Individual Portrait Both · 99%
The composition centers on one male sitter rather than a group, with his face and upper body occupying most of the vertical panel.
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Face Visual · 98%
The sitter’s face is the dominant visual focus, rendered with close attention to the eyes, nose, mouth, hair, and subtle tonal modeling.
Visual Qualities
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Dark Colors Visual · 94%
Deep blue, black, brown, and burgundy areas dominate the background, cap, hair, collar, and jacket, producing a predominantly dark tonal range.
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Highly Detailed Visual · 95%
The face, hair, costume, cap ornament, hand, ring, and arrow are rendered with exceptionally precise descriptive detail.
Medium and Techniques
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Oil Painting Metadata · 99%
The museum record identifies the classification as painting and the medium as oil on panel.
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Oil on Panel Metadata · 99%
The canonical medium is explicitly listed as oil on panel.
Time Periods
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15th Century Art Metadata · 99%
The work is dated circa 1470/1475, placing it in the fifteenth century.
Source & rights
Hans Memling. Portrait of a Man with an Arrow. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.