Portret van een onbekende man, foutief aangeduid als Thomas Gresham 1779

Curator: Here we have a portrait from 1779, once thought to depict Thomas Gresham, though the sitter's identity remains unconfirmed. Jean-Baptiste Michel executed this print, combining etching and engraving techniques, and it now resides here at the Rijksmuseum. Editor: It has this intriguing stillness to it. The way the light catches the intricate details of his sleeves creates almost hypnotic patterns. There's something profoundly sober and self-contained in the man’s gaze. He feels like a figure pulled directly from a history play. Curator: The piece speaks to the enduring appeal of portraiture and history-painting, which frequently blurred in Neoclassical prints, which aimed for posterity and a public role. Prints had great value, as their circulation shaped political discourse in revolutionary eras, for instance. The image would have offered viewers in that period insight, supposedly into the likeness of Thomas Gresham but regardless it participates in constructing the idea of historical importance through images. Editor: Absolutely! It's an object carrying stories and aspirations—hopes, or perhaps demands, that some figures persist in cultural memory. But it also begs questions about who gets remembered, doesn’t it? The fact that his identity is even uncertain introduces this great irony into it; the face we recognize isn’t even necessarily the person it’s meant to represent! Curator: It brings forward that concern in ways entirely unforeseen. Prints had an inherently democratic ambition through mass distribution, aiming for historical narratives accessible and tangible for broad publics. Errors could therefore also rapidly circulate... Editor: Maybe it makes the image even more compelling; it whispers of forgotten stories, misplaced identities, and all those unnamed faces that history overlooks, now eternally embraced by its narrative, despite all odds. I am really in love with the level of detailing to his clothing. Curator: Precisely. That initial attribution assigned a significance it never merited on its own, it shows how identities are molded, manipulated, and occasionally, just entirely mistaken through history's image machine. Editor: Makes you wonder about all those misattributed moments in our lives, doesn't it? This piece, so evocative yet so fundamentally uncertain, reminds us how fragile those narratives are.