Who is the boy? [9]

Laurens Alma Tadema,  Head study, c1858, Walters AG Baltimore

 

the model for this fairly roughly painted study was presumably a young man in Antwerp, there the artist studied and worked in the late 1850s.  He wears a black shirt under a dark brown coat and a fur or rather wool-trimmed cap. An unlocated companion work depicting a profile head of the same sitter shows the cap was  leather-crowned, with the deep astrakhan brim seen full face here and standing in for the boy's [presumed] dark curly hair.  Presumed also a boy, because clean-shaven, although he might be quite a bit older.  And presumed of African ancestry owing to his dark skin, and warm coat and cap against European winter.   Therefore presumed to have been a seafarer,  moonlighting it were in Antwerp between sailings.

But he could have been born anywhere from the Caribbean to Indonesia, and a permanent resident in Antwerp's busy entrepot.  His abstracted expression suggests that the arftist was chiefly concerned with the work as a study in dark tones rather than portraiture, although the lad's static features are enlivened by the reflected lights on nose and lip.

Whatever, Alma Tadema was sufficiently pleased with both his studies of the unnamed model to take them with him when he moved to Britain, and keep them in his studio there.