Follower of Jusepe de Ribera

Ribera's manner was easy to recognise and hard to leave alone. Deep shadow, one raking light, skin painted wrinkle by wrinkle, and the faces of the old and the poor given the attention usually kept for a commissioned portrait. Painters in Naples and in Spain worked that way for decades after him. A museum calls such a painter a follower when the style is unmistakable and the name is gone.

Among the paintings under this name, two are in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. One is a portrait of an old woman, which the Bavarian catalogue lists under Ribera as the work of a follower. The other shows the executioner holding the head of John the Baptist, and it has been in the Bavarian collection since 1799. Another, The Geographer, an old man with a pair of compasses and a globe, was bought by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1899.