Beard of the Week LXXVI: Barbe en Château
This week's stylishly modern-looking beard belongs to the unidentified subject of a painting, known as "Portrait of a Red-Bearded Man", attributed to Dutch painter Jan Anthonisz van Ravensteyn (c. 1570–1657), a man for whom I can find virtually no biographical information. Judging from dates painted on the canvas (outside the frame of my cropped image of the man), it was probably painted between 1604 and 1607.*
This lovely portrait comes to our attention here at BoW HQ thanks to Bill M., friend of this blog, who recently returned from a trip to France. He spotted the BoW potential of this painting (his original photograph) on a visit to the château de Chenonceau, near Tours, where it hangs. (In what room seems to be information I don't have anywhere, or have since misplaced. Bill did mention that it hangs next to an "Adoration of the Magi" by Peter Paul Rubens)
This château, even if its name is not familiar, will probably look familiar in the photographs: it is the one we always see with its dramatic, long gallery built over the river Cher. (The official website, and one of Bill's photographs.) Here is a charming short history of the château from a group that organizes tours to that destination (and their website has a nice virtual tour):
Built in the early XVIth century by Catherine Briçonnet, the Château de Chenonceau got its splendor from the successive women who kept expanding and enhancing it throughout the centuries, including Diane de Poitiers and Catherine de Medicis, respectively best mistress and wife of Henry II, before Louise de Lorraine, Madame Dupin and Madame Pelouze.
(I'm thinking that "best mistress" might be an awkward translation of the original French "favorite", where just plain "mistress" would probably do. But I am not versed in the nomenclature and protocols of hierarchy of Royal French extra-marital affairs of the time.)
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* Dates near 1600 seem to keep popping up in relation to things that I find interesting. There were interesting things happening in music, for example, not least among my favorites in England with the Elizabethans. Shakespeare was active. Art was blossoming. Tycho Brahe was still alive and making the measurements that his assistant, Johannes Kepler, would soon use to deduce that planetary orbits are elliptical. Galileo was active, Newton had not been born yet, and John Napier didn't publish his invention of logarithms until 1614, nor had Descartes published his book on analytical geometry yet. Imagine: plane geometry, as taught in Euclid, was the most advanced mathematics of the time.