Selbstbildnis (?)

The question mark in the title is honest. Scholars have argued for more than a century about who this white-bearded man in a dark coat and ruff actually is, painted by El Greco in Toledo around 1595 to 1600. For a long time people wanted it to be the artist himself, near sixty, looking straight out at us with those tired, searching eyes. The trouble is that no one really knows what El Greco looked like. He seems to have slipped his own face into the crowd in a few of his religious paintings, and the men there resemble this sitter but look younger and stronger. So it drifts in and out of being called a self-portrait as the argument swings. Either way it's a stripped-down, sober kind of portrait for him, no props, no colour, just the head and hands emerging from the dark, the loose grey brushwork of the beard done with real speed and confidence.