Portret van een onbekende man Possibly 1848

Johann Peter Berghaus made this portrait of an unknown man in the Netherlands, sometime in the mid-19th century. Though we don’t know who the sitter was, he can tell us a lot about the social conventions of that time. The man is dressed in the bourgeois style, the fashions of the middle class. His beard and hairstyle mark him as a man of the times, and his jacket and bow tie indicate a certain level of wealth, while also subtly suggesting modesty. In a time of great social change, images like this were a way to fix status, and to promote certain cultural values. The Rijksmuseum, like other museums, has its own history in the formation of a national culture, and this image can help us understand that history better. To find out more about that, you might consult library resources like the museum’s own archive, or primary source documents that tell us more about the changing face of Dutch society in the 19th century.