Jongeman met een pet 1854 - 1907

Eberhard Cornelis Rahms created this small portrait of a young man wearing a cap using etching. Rahms, who was a contemporary of the Hague School, was working in a period where artists moved away from idealized representations, embracing a grittier realism. Here we see a young man, his features soft and somewhat obscured by the shadows. He is not a hero or a king, but an ordinary person. The cap he wears suggests a casual, perhaps working-class identity, hinting at the shifting social landscape of the Netherlands in the 19th century. The intimate scale of the etching draws us in. What was the nature of the relationship between Rahms and his sitter? Did Rahms seek to elevate the status of this young man through art? Or was he interested in simply capturing a slice of everyday life? This etching speaks to a democratization of portraiture, making visible those who were previously unseen in the grand narratives of art history.