Tronie  

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A tronie (Dutch for a "face") is a common type of Dutch and Flemish Baroque painting that shows an exaggerated facial expression or a stock character in costume. Typically a painted head or bust only, if concentrating on the facial expression, but often half-length if an exotic costume featured, they might be based on studies from life or use the features of actual sitters. But the image would normally be sold on the art market without identification of the sitter, and would not have been commissioned and retained by the sitter as portraits normally were. Several Rembrandt self-portrait etchings are tronies, as are paintings of himself, his son and his women. (This is true of modern art-historical terminology; however, historical usage is not so precise. Seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish inventories of paintings might use the term for any unidentified sitter. Three Vermeer paintings were described as "tronies" in the Dissius auction of 1696, perhaps including the Girl with a Pearl Earring and the Washington Girl with a flute.

The tronie is related to, and has some overlap with, the "portrait historié", a portrait of a real person as another, usually historical or mythological, figure. Jan de Bray specialised in these, and many portraitists sometimes showed aristocratic ladies in particular as mythological figures.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Tronie" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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