Portrait of a Doctor of Law

By the mid-1630s Zurbarán was the painter Seville's monasteries went to, producing saints and white-robed monks by the cycle and crating pictures for shipment to Spanish America. Portraits from his hand are rare, and this is one of them. The man stands at close to life size, almost two metres of canvas, in the full-length format that usually signalled high rank, and he is a lawyer. He may be Juan de la Lanza, painted when he took the chair of law at the university of Sigüenza, north-east of Madrid. The picture later belonged to Ivan Shchukin, a Russian who collected Spanish old masters in Paris and ran himself into debt doing it, and it came up in his posthumous sale at the Hôtel Drouot in June 1908. Isabella Stewart Gardner bought it in New York two years later for 20,000 dollars and hung it in her Dutch Room.