Portret van een onbekende man Possibly 1858

Johann Peter Berghaus made this portrait of an unknown man sometime in the mid-19th century, with graphite on paper. The man's formal attire reflects the rising merchant class of the Netherlands at the time. The fashions of the period and the relative newness of the lithograph as a means of reproduction could be interpreted as an embrace of modernity, but also as a marker of social status. It is interesting to speculate who the sitter might have been. The details of the man’s clothing and the accoutrements that accompany it give a sense of the values and aspirations of the time. The growth of civic institutions such as museums and libraries and the new availability of portraiture to a broader section of the population gave a novel prominence to representations of the individual. To understand this work better, one might look at Dutch fashion plates or other period lithographs and engravings. By doing so, we can come to understand not only this image, but the social structures of the time in which it was made.