Porträt eines unbekannten Herrn

This severe portrait of an unnamed Spanish gentleman hangs in a country house on the edge of Glasgow, which takes some explaining. El Greco painted it in Toledo in the early 1600s, in the tight, sober manner he used for the city's clergy and nobles, a pale face and white ruff emerging from darkness with the eyes doing nearly all the work. Two centuries later Spanish painting was still little known in Britain, until William Stirling-Maxwell, a Scottish collector fascinated by the history of Spain, began buying it in earnest and assembled the finest such collection outside Madrid and Vienna. That is how a Cretan-born painter's Toledo portrait reached Pollok House. The sitter's name has been lost, and the catalogue records him only as a gentleman.