Saint Jerome in his Study
The only known religious painting by the Monogrammist I.S., which features Saint Jerome in his studio with a lion and a cat, was sold by Nicholas Hall to a private foundation.
Provenance
Private Collection, France
with Nicholas Hall, by 2026
from whom acquired by a private foundation
Exhibitions
Leiden, Museum De Lakenhal, Masterful Mystery – On Rembrandt’s Enigmatic Contemporary, 11 October 2025–8 March 2026
Bibliography
Luuk Pijl, ‘Masterful Mystery: On Rembrandt’s Enigmatic Contemporary’, The Burlington Magazine, London, 2026, vol. 168, no.1474, pp. 66–68, reproduced fig. 14.
Little remains certain about the origins or identity of the Monogrammist I.S. since he was first studied in 1904 by Theodor von Frimmel. Opinions vary as to whether the artist was a German, Baltic, or Dutch-born painter, but the consensus is that he worked in Leiden as the artist’s refined, articulated brushwork, his subject matter and his almost scientific realism reflect the influence of the young Rembrandt, Jan Lievens and the Fijnschilder Gerrit Dou. The first ever monographic exhibition of the Monogrammist took place in Mänttä, Finland and Leiden, The Netherlands in 2025 and 2026, bringing together works by the enigmatic artist alongside these Leiden masters.
Besides a few paintings bearing the initials ‘I.S.’, most of the small body of works ascribed to the Monogrammist are done so on a stylistic basis. Dating between 1632 to 1658, his oeuvre comprises primarily of tronies—a type of character study popularized by Rembrandt and his milieu starting around 1630—typically of elderly men or women. While artists in Rembrandt’s circle were no strangers to painting imaginary figures from Eastern Europe, the Monogrammist’s sitters typically wear garments associated with life in colder regions of the continent. His penchant for exotic costumes which, as Volker Manuth and Marieke de Winkel note, provide crucial context for almost all of his works; it also hints at his possible Northern or Eastern European identity, a theory further corroborated by his Portrait of a Young Man with a Tall Fur Hat and Gorget (fig. 1; private collection), a late addition to the Leiden-leg of the recent monographic show as a self-portrait. An intriguing aspect about his work is his unflinching realism that not only records the visceral effects of aging but also capturing deformities with great sympathy. Most strikingly, paintings such as the Man with a Growth on His Nose (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) and the newly discovered Man with a Blind Eye (Private collection, France, recently acquired by the Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden), have led to speculation that the painter could have been a doctor or studied medicine at Leiden University.
Besides tronies, the Monogrammist I.S. painted a group of interior genre scenes featuring a single figure with books and vanitas objects, to which this St. Jerome belongs. Our picture depicts the saint writing at a desk in a bare chamber, surrounded by the sparse accoutrements of his scholastic life; a cat crouches in the shadowy foreground while a rather tentative lion peeks out from the room behind. Most peculiarly, only the lowest part of the chandelier appears in the picture – a framing strategy found in another interior scene by the artist, the Portrait of an Old Man in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig (fig. 2). Such works were produced throughout the Monogrammist’s career, with the earliest being the Young Scholar of 1633 (fig. 3; Schloss Johannisburg Aschaffenburg, Munich) and the latest, the Old Woman, possibly an Abbess, Reading a Letter signed and dated 1658 (fig. 4; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm). It shows the artist’s awareness of the revived interest in the vanitas genre in Leiden in the early 17th century, exemplified by works such as Jan Davidsz de Heem’s Student or Interior of a Room with a Young Man seated at a Table from 1628 (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). Remarkably, ours is the only religious painting by the Monogrammist I.S.