Portrait miniature of an unknown man, watercolour on vellum, possibly a 19th-century fake, in imitation of Alexander Cooper.

Portrait, head and shoulders, to right and looking to front. Features firmly hatched in brown and sanguine with grey shadow on a thick yellowish carnation ground; the beard crisply stippled in dark grey; hair in brown wash, hatched and lined with darker colour and with broad gouache lights, the whole enriched with gum; the ruff a grey wash modelled with white; costume a dark brown wash, hatched and heightened with gouache; chain in gold; background an opaque blue wash, hatched with darker colour lower right; gold marginal strip; on vellum put down on plain card.

Frame: Nineteenth-century copper-gilt locket, the back flat set into straight sides, the bezel toothed over the glass; the hanger a plain, nearly circular loop of D-section soldered on; packed out with cut-up playing cards of c.1680.

Salting Bequest

Provenance: Bought by George Salting from an unrecorded source for £188; bequeathed by him to the Museum, 1910.

This miniature may in fact be a 19th-century fake painted in imitation of Cooper's style.

Both Peter Oliver and Alexander Cooper have been thought to paint this miniature. But in his entry on this miniature in his catalogue Seventeenth-century English Miniatures in the Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (1997), John Murdoch concludes that ‘It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the miniature is indeed a clever 19th-century fake’ (catalogue number 59).

P.132-1910