Portrait of a Franciscan (?)

Barely 19 centimetres tall, about the size of a postcard, this portrait shares a single piece of wood with its frame. Panel and frame were carved together from one board of Baltic oak, and the man rests his fingertips on the lower edge, as if on a windowsill. The National Gallery thinks this may be one of the earliest surviving portraits to use that device, which Netherlandish painters later took up again and again.

Who he was is unknown, and the question mark in the title is honest. He wears the grey habit of a Franciscan friar, yet his hair has not been shaved on top the way the friars wore it. His face is strongly lit against a dark blue ground, and his eyes do not quite look the same way. Infrared images show that he first held a book. The painter changed it to the scroll he holds now, which carries no writing at all. The oak came from the same tree as a small Virgin and Child in an Interior, also in the Gallery, so the two panels passed through one carpenter's hands.