Herman Doomer (ca. 1595–1650)

Herman Doomer was a successful cabinetmaker who worked with the imported ebony fashionable in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The exceptional care Rembrandt took with this likeness may indicate his esteem for a fellow master artisan. At roughly the same time Rembrandt painted the portrait of Doomer and a companion piece of his wife (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), the couple’s son Lambert was an apprentice in the artist’s studio.

Credit: H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929