Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap

Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap, also known as Man with a Red Cap, is an oil painting by the Venetian painter Titian, made in about 1516. It is part of the Frick Collection in New York City.

Date
Two portraits of young men have been ascribed to the years immediately following Titian's stay at Padua (c. 1513–1515): namely the Man with a Red Cap and the Man with a Glove. The Frick Collection dates the former picture slightly later (c. 1516).

Provenance
Although the sitter has not been identified, this portrait was apparently well known, at least in the seventeenth century, and Carlo Dolci painted a copy of the figure into the background of his Martyrdom of Saint Andrew (Palazzo Pitti, Florence).

The painting passed through several private hands before being auctioned by Christie's in 1906 and purchased by Sir Hugh Lane, from whom it was eventually acquired by Henry Clay Frick in 1915. The art critic Charles Ricketts, writing in 1910, recalled the 1906 rediscovery of a portrait by Titian:

"It passed through Messrs. Christies' some time ago in a darkened and dirty condition. I then imagined this beautiful Giorgionesque work to be an early work of Francesco Vecellio, basing my impression on the colour and on the evidence of Francesco's knowledge of Titian's methods. The picture has since been cleaned. When I saw it again the scales fell from my eyes, to use a consecrated expression. How was it possible that I could have mistaken this masterpiece for the work of a second-rate man? How was it that the shape of the eyelids, the construction of the chin and the shape of the shadows had escaped me? The brown background had become a luminous warm grey, the glove and fur, which I had thought indifferent, revealed the tender pigment of the master; the painting of the linen in pâte sur pâte was a practice of Titian's. The work stood out, not as a mere interesting problem like the 'Head' at Frankfort, but a masterpiece superior in preservation to the Cobham 'Ariosto,' contemporary with, or slightly later than, the beautiful portrait at Temple Newsam."