Pieter van Mol’s formative years were spent in the Antwerp workshop of Artus Wolffort, who like van Mol’s other great influence, Peter Paul Rubens, was trained in the studio of Otto van Veen. By 1623/4 van Mol was a master of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke; by 1631 he is recorded in Paris, where he set up a studio. He was appointed court painter to the French King Louis XIII in 1637, and he received the title of 'peintre ordinaire du roi’. On 19 February 1640 Pieter van Mol married Anne van der Burght (or Anna van der Burch) in the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. The couple had eight children, of whom Robert van Mol became a painter and engraver. Around that time he had also been appointed court painter to the French Queen, Anne of Austria. Commissioned also to paint such major works as The Adoration of The Shepherds for the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Près (now in the Musée des Beaux- Arts Marseille), he was a founding member of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, which was established nearby in 1648 by Cardinal Mazarin.

Recorded in the collection of the Marquesses of Lothian since at least the early 18th century, the present picture has a distinguished provenance, which likely extends to the Marquesses’ predecessor, Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram (1578 -1674). Ancram, was famously portrayed by Jan Lievens. The Earl was an avid collector who lived between Britain and the Low Countries – first exiled from Whitehall for a duel in which he killed a companion of the George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and then during the English Civil War. A staunch Royalist, Ancram served as Gentleman of the Bedchamber to King Charles I.

The present work sits within the Antwerp artistic practice of workshop tronies, first popularized by mannerist masters of an earlier generation such as Frans Floris. Theses heads could be reused multiple times for different figures in larger compositions. The present work - with its strong nose, prominent cheek bones and ruddy complexion - bears many similarities to van Mol’s Jesus (location unknown).

Van Mol’s adept style ranged from almost deliberately retrograde works with extremely fine facture, apparently in homage to the Flemish primitives, such as his Lamentation of Christ conserved in the Musée des beaux-arts de Valenciennes, to the present free execution of Two Head Studies of a Man, and the aforementioned, Jeune Homme à la Mitre. Both the present work and the Louvre painting exude van Mol’s painterly brio and flair, which rivals that of van Dyck or Jordaens, in whose orbit this study was first placed. Scholars have however since recognised the present study as a masterful and characteristic work from the hand of van Mol.