Attributed to Diego Velázquez

Velázquez rarely signed a canvas and dated even fewer, and the inventories of the Spanish royal palaces often recorded a picture by its subject alone. That leaves a great deal to the eye. Attributed to is the label a museum uses when the eye says Velázquez and the documents cannot confirm it. The picture is thought probably to be his, and the museum stops one step short of saying so.

With Velázquez that step is unusually wide. Several of his early Seville pictures survive in more than one version, and not every version is his. In Madrid he worked inside the royal palace with assistants who learned to lay paint the way he did, thin and quick, with forms suggested more than drawn. When a canvas from that circle turns up without a signature or a record, scholars must choose between the master, his studio and a gifted imitator on the evidence of the brushwork alone.

The judgement keeps moving, in both directions. In 2009 the Metropolitan Museum in New York cleaned a Portrait of a Man it had long catalogued as a workshop picture, and once the old varnish was gone it gave the canvas back to Velázquez. In 2010 an Education of the Virgin, kept for decades in storage at the Yale University Art Gallery, was proposed as an early work from his Seville years, a claim some specialists still question.