Portret van een man, buste, met breedgerande hoed c. 1836 - 1873

Johann Wilhelm Friedrich Kachel made this bust-length portrait of a man with a broad-brimmed hat using graphite sometime in the mid-19th century. The sitter’s somewhat rakish appearance seems to suggest a life outside the bounds of conventional society. During the 1800s, new artistic academies and museums sought to bring culture to a wider public. Yet some artists and intellectuals worried that academic art was becoming stale, and so they sought inspiration from outside the established institutions. They looked to folk art or the art of other cultures, and they often favored scenes of everyday life, or representations of the working class. The broad-brimmed hat could have been worn by members of the rural working class in several European countries, and we may consider the possibility that the artist is celebrating this sitter's working-class roots. To understand this work more fully, it would be useful to study Dutch fashion of the period, popular literature, and the history of art education. The meaning of art is always contingent on its historical and cultural context.