A Cavalier

Frans van Mieris the Elder, 1658

A Cavalier is a self-portrait by the Dutch painter Frans van Mieris the Elder, showing him as a well-dressed gentleman of seventeenth-century Dutch society. The record gives 1658 as the date, though some sources place the work in 1657, so both dates should be treated with some caution. Painted in oil on a very small canvas, roughly twenty by sixteen centimetres, it reflects the taste for intimate, finely detailed portraits associated with Dutch genre painting. What makes the picture notable today is its disappearance: in 2007 it was taken from the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney while the gallery was open to the public, and it has never been recovered. That loss has earned it a place on the FBI's list of Top Ten Art Crimes, and its value is estimated at around one million dollars. Its modest size, which made it easy to carry away, illustrates how vulnerable works of this kind can be.

Painter: Frans van Mieris the Elder
Date: 1658
Medium: oil paint, canvas
Dimensions: 20 × 16 cm
Museum: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Genre: portrait
Depicts: man

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**Brothel Scene**1659Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands Art Collection

**Young Woman threading Pearls**1658Musée Fabre

**Pictura (An Allegory of Painting)**1661J. Paul Getty Museum

**Wife of Jeroboam and the Prophet Ahijah**1671Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille

**The Painter in his Studio**1656Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

**The interrupted song**1671Musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Paris

**A Boy Blowing Bubbles**1663Mauritshuis

**A gentleman and a lady**1678Rijksmuseum

**Portrait of a Lady with a Lapdog**1672Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

**Officer in a Cloth Shop**1660Kunsthistorisches Museum

**A Girl selling Grapes to an old Woman**1655Royal Collection

**Woman before a Mirror**1662Gemäldegalerie Berlin