Attributed to Diego Velázquez

In 1926 the New York collector Jules Bache bought a portrait of a man from the dealer Joseph Duveen as a self-portrait by Velázquez. Over the following decades the experts grew less sure. The Velázquez scholar José López-Rey called it a school piece in 1963, and in 1979 the Metropolitan Museum, which had received it with Bache's bequest in 1949, catalogued it as workshop of Velázquez. Then a cleaning in 2009 removed thick, discoloured varnish and an old restoration, and the museum's curators gave the picture back to the master himself.

That swing is what Attributed to tries to hold. The museum thinks a picture is by Velázquez but stops short of saying so outright. With him the doubt is sharp, because at the Madrid court of Philip IV he worked with assistants who repeated royal portraits, and later painters studied his manner closely. The Met presented its rediscovered portrait in an exhibition called Velázquez Rediscovered, which opened in November 2009.