The melancholy young man in this striking portrait has had no fewer than four possible identifications over the last two hundred years. When first discovered in Venice in the late eighteenth century, it was fancifully identified as the Flemish artist Theodor van Thulden, who was born in 1606, and who would have been far too young to have been painted by Van Dyck in the early 1620s.   When the painting was acquired in 1794 by the distinguished English collector, Sir Abraham Hume, he identified it as of Jean Le Clerc, the Lorraine Caravaggesque painter. In 1980, Larsen considered that the sitter was a different Jean Le Clerc, the Parisian engraver active in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century.   David Freedberg considered that the painting was closely related to a stylistically similar portrait by Van Dyck in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, which he identified to be of Virginio Cesarini (1595-1624), on the basis of comparison with a sculpted bust of the sitter.  Analysis of the available evidence, however, suggests that the identity of the sitter could be Jean Le Clerc, the Lorraine painter, although there was only a very short period when both artist and sitter were in Italy.

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