Portret van een bebaarde man 1716 - 1761

Pieter Tanjé created this print of a bearded man sometime in the first half of the 18th century. It is an engraving, a medium that lends itself to the clear reproduction of images, and was made in the Netherlands, a place and time that was seeing an emergent middle class of merchants and traders. It’s worth asking, who was this man and why would someone like Tanjé make a print of him? Was he a well-known philosopher or religious figure, whose image was marketable to a broad public? The subject’s refined clothing suggests wealth and status, and indeed the coat of arms at the bottom of the print indicates that this man was likely a member of the Dutch regency. Engravings like this one give us a window onto the elites of Dutch society. As historians, we can study these images alongside estate inventories, genealogical records, and other historical documents to get a clearer sense of the social world they inhabited.