Portrait of a gentleman before a draped table, three-quarter-length, a landscape beyond

When this portrait emerged on the market in 1911, the art critic Auguste Marguillier proclaimed it ‘in every way worthy of our richest museums’ and asked ‘Who is this new-comer?...Who is Louis Vallée?’ More than a century on, Vallée remains as enigmatic an artist as he was then. Only one document, the registration of his burial in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam on 28 May 1653, has come to light. He was evidently living on the Warmoesstraat at the time of his death, and it seems likely he died young – possibly from an outbreak of the plague in Amsterdam in 1653 – as dated portraits and history paintings by him are known only from 1646 to 1653. A familial connection with Simon de la Vallée, a French architect who worked for Prince Frederik Hendrik at Honselaarsdijk Palace outside The Hague between 1633 and 1637, cannot be ruled out. Indeed, Vallée’s Silvio with the Wounded Dorinda of 1651 (National Gallery of Art, Washington) largely depends for its composition on Herman Saftleven’s 1635 depiction of the same subject for the famed Pastor Fido cycle at Honselaarsdijk, suggesting the artist may have had access to the palace.

Vallée’s slick portraits, of which this is a particularly fine example, exhibit a penchant for detailed, tactile depictions of dress that approaches the work of Bartholomeus van der Helst, Amsterdam’s most fashionable portraitist in the middle of the seventeenth century. Similarly, his history paintings were influenced by Jacob Adriaensz. Backer, with whom Vallée may have studied in Amsterdam. Despite his close association with Amsterdam and comparatively brief career, Vallée’s reputation was sufficiently high in his lifetime that his clientele extended beyond the metropolis’ walls to cities like Leiden and Haarlem.