Self-Portrait

In the second half of the 1650s, Job Berckheyde and his brother Gerrit went on a study trip to Germany. Among the places they visited was Heidelberg where, according to the eighteenth-century artists’ biographer Arnold Houbraken, the brothers each painted Elector Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate’s hunting party. The elector was delighted with the paintings, accepted them and rewarded the brothers with a medallion.
The gold medallion that Job wears on his chest, suspended on a broad ribbon, in this self-portrait may be the medallion about which Houbraken goes into so much detail. The portrait was probably painted shortly after the brothers’ return to Haarlem. Berckheyde wears dark clothes with a flat collar and tassels. He wears a skull-cap on the back of his head.
An interesting note is that this self-portrait can be seen as a painting within a painting in another self-portrait by Job Berckheyde, now in the Uffizi in Florence. In the Uffizi portrait the painter is in his studio, wearing clothes that were old-fashioned for the time, and possibly never really existed as such. He is surrounded by attributes that symbolize the senses.
The self-portrait hangs on the back wall of the studio and is shown – frame and all – in mirror image.