Philip III

On Christmas Eve 1734 the old royal Alcazar in Madrid burned, and with it a large canvas Velazquez had painted in 1627 showing the expulsion of the Moriscos, the descendants of Spain's Muslim population, ordered by Philip the Third in 1609. It won him a competition against the other court painters and hung in the palace's Salon Nuevo. We know it only from written descriptions, which say the king stood at the centre of it, looking into the distance. This small canvas, barely 45 centimetres tall and left in a sketchy state, is very probably how Velazquez worked out that face. He had a problem to solve. Philip the Third died in 1621, two years before Velazquez arrived at court, so the painter had never laid eyes on the man whose portrait had to carry the picture. The head was lost to scholarship for a long time under a wrong name. It was bought in London as a likeness of Rodrigo Calderon, a courtier of that reign who was beheaded in Madrid in 1621, the confusion coming from a later inscription along the top. The Prado received it in 2021 as a gift from the American Friends of the museum.