A tronie is the Modern Dutch word for mask, originally a theatrical term for a stock character in comedy and tragedy. The term is derived from the French word tron, which means full moon. It is not related to the English "troll" but comes from a verb meaning "to wear". The original meaning of the word, now obsolete as well as in current Dutch usage, was someone who wears a mask or disguises him or herself.
A tronie has been described as "a head, or half-length figure of a person, whose expression and attitude are calculated to elicit laughter", as in a genre of Dutch Golden Age painting. The term tronie is derived from the Dutch word meaning face. The typical tronie is a realistic head or face and upper torso, viewed frontally. Tronies are distinguished from portraits by their distortion, since the highly expressive faces depicted in them were meant to beguile and amuse the viewer, rather than serve as accurate representations.
Tronies are paintings of individuals who are unidentifiable. Tronies were a common feature of Dutch and Flemish art, and usually depicted people in costume or exotic dress, often in half length format. They were not meant to be portraits of specific people, but to serve as full length figures that could be used as set pieces in still life compositions. In modern usage tronies are considered genre paintings rather than portraits, despite the fact that they may have been created with a specific sitter in mind.
The genre was probably inspired by some of Leonardo da Vinci's grotesque heads, which he drew from 1513 to 1517. Leonardo pioneered drawings of paired grotesque heads whereby two heads, usually in profile, were placed opposite each other in order to accentuate their diversity (as seen in his "Abundance" series), and this paired juxtaposition was also adopted by artists in the Low Countries. The van Doetecum brothers are believed to have engraved 72 sets of paired heads attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder based on drawings made by his father and son that followed this paired arrangement.
A total of 16 Rembrandt etchings were described as "tronie" in the Dissius auction of 1696. The Girl with a Pearl Earring may be one of them. Self-portraits are also tronies, as are paintings of his son and his wives. Several Frans Hals paintings were described as "tronies" in the Dissius auction of 1696, including the Girl with a Pearl Earring and other Harper's Bazaar favorites such as A Gypsy Woman Playing the Barschtrommel.
