Portrait of a Man

Alessandro Longhi was a Venetian portrait painter and the son of the famous genre painter Pietro Longhi, who trained him in a manner that combined his father's close observational interest in Venetian social life with the more formal demands of commissioned portraiture. This 1733 Portrait of a Man belongs to his early work, showing the qualities that would make him the leading portrait painter of the Venetian elite in the second half of the eighteenth century — a confident pose, careful attention to the sitter's individual physiognomy, and warm Venetian colour. Alessandro also wrote a biographical dictionary of Venetian painters, making him a significant figure in both the practice and the documentation of eighteenth-century Venetian painting. His portraits document the appearance of the patrician and professional class who governed Venice in its final decades of independence.

The portrait employs a standard three-quarter pose with confident Venetian handling — warm flesh tones built from a reddish-brown ground, the dark costume handled with broad strokes that give maximum projection to the lighter face. The background is kept neutral to focus attention on the sitter's features and bearing.