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This portrait intentionally minimizes the boundaries between sitter and viewer. Unlike most portrait sitters, this gentleman is rendered as active. Beham, who trained in Nuremberg before moving to the Bavarian court in Munich, presented him full face, attentively watching something or someone on the viewer's side of the picture plane. He writes numbers in chalk on the wooden table, perhaps tallying the changing scores of a game in progress. The picture's date is marked in the lower left. Beham opted for a frontal pose yet one that creates depth through its diagonal movement. The artist worked throughout to establish a realistic and highly tactile space. In the reflection in the eyes, in the glint of light on the sword handle and in the transparency of the wine glass, Beham recorded the presence of a window behind the viewer. Beham conscious manipulation of figure and space anticipates Jan Vermeer, Carel Fabritius and other Baroque masters.
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