Portrait of a Man

A number of oil miniatures with distinctive characteristics—such as sharp lighting with a highlight on the tip of the nose and dark shadows under the eyes—were painted in the mid-seventeenth century in England and signed with the initials FS. Other miniatures without this signature have been assigned to the same artist because they share these stylistic traits. The initials have been identified as those of Franciszek Smiadecki, who is believed to have been the son of a serf of the Orlov family (who were members of the Russian nobility) and to have gone when young to Sweden, where he was taught miniature painting by Alexander Cooper (1609–?1660). This biography is, however, largely conjectural.

This miniature is close in style to the above group, as Richard Allen (verbal opinion, 1977) observed. It is certainly of mid-seventeenth-century origin and not, as Paine (1960) suggested, a nineteenth-century copy. The sitter is evidently an English soldier of the Commonwealth period, about 1650. The inscription on the back—Gen. Monk—is recent and the proposed identification is not supported by comparison with the miniature portrait by Samuel Cooper of George Monck (1608–1670), first duke of Albemarle (John Murdoch, in The English Miniature, exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1981, p. 117, fig. 131).

[2015; adapted from Reynolds and Baetjer 1996]

Mrs. Leopold (Millie Bruhl) Fredrick, New York (possibly by 1936, definitely by 1960–d. 1962; inv., 1960, no. 51)

Brooklyn Museum. "Five Centuries of Miniature Painting," April 3–June 1, 1936, no. 9 (as "Man in Armor," by Samuel Cooper, lent by Mrs. Leopold Fredrick, possibly this picture).

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "European Miniatures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art," November 5, 1996–January 5, 1997, no. 28.

Edward Grosvenor Paine. Inventory of the miniatures in the Fredrick collection. 1960, p. 7, no. 51, as by Peter Oliver, about 1640, but with a parenthetical comment that it is a late-nineteenth-century copy.

Graham Reynolds with the assistance of Katharine Baetjer. European Miniatures in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1996, p. 82, no. 28, ill. p. 83, call it close in style to the group of oil miniatures signed FS and date it about 1650; reject the identification of the sitter as General Monck appearing in a recent inscription on the back of the miniature.