Portret van een jonge man 1889 - 1925

This small portrait of a young man was made by Josephus Hendrikus Petrus Coppens, but we don’t know exactly when. The sepia tones feel like a memory, a whisper from the past, and I find myself wondering, what was Coppens thinking when he made this? Did he know this young man? There’s a gentleness in the way he’s rendered, especially in the soft blurring of the features, the slight halo around his head. The artist's process is not about sharp details but about capturing a feeling, an impression. It reminds me a little of those daguerreotypes, those early photographs where the image seems to emerge from a silvery mist. Maybe this was a new way of thinking about portraiture. You know, this reminds me of Gerhard Richter’s blurred portraits, that same sense of something just beyond our grasp. It's all part of this ongoing conversation, this beautiful, messy, ambiguous thing we call art.