Portrait of Adriaen de Witte, 1544

UPDATE: a reader alerts me that the reverse of the painting makes it clear that it is a copy made in 1925! The same reverse also indicates that the copy was made by Christiane de Préval, an accomplished painter in her own right, so it's not as if it is a worthless amateur copy, but the (probably) earliest and relatively well executed copy of an interesting portrait.

At Sylvie Dagot, in Montluçon, France, they sell a "Man with fur collar" portrait, with no indication whatsoever of school, origin, age, ... and an estimate of 300 to 500 Euro.

The painting looked distinctly Holbeinian in style (though not good enough to be a real Holbein of course), but the poor image gave me little hope of finding out more. But when zooming in, I could just read "Adriaen de Witte" in the label at the bottom of the painting.

It turns out that it is a copy / alternate version of a painting of a certain Adriaen De Witte, the original being kept in the city museum in Twente, the Netherlands. Why anyone would copy this is unclear (perhaps in the 19th century, as a painting exercise or something similar?), it seems doubtful that it was done at the time of creation. But if it is a contemporary copy, then you get a 16th century Flemish portrait of a known sitter for a bargain price. It looks to be inferior, but it clearly is dirty, so it may be that something of similar quality is lurking underneath that brownish portrait.

The RKD gives more information on the Twente portrait, including the information that the De Witte family lived in Belgium and France, increasing the chances of an old version ending up in France. This would also explain why the one for sale has a heraldic shield in the top right which is missing in the Twente version. The shield looks the same as the one of the De Wittes (with a "chevron" in the middle), so perhaps it is a copy made by the family to remember their first known ancestor (the De Wittes were for ages a family of nobility in Flanders and the north of France).