Portrait of a gentleman

By the time El Greco painted this, around 1586, he had settled in Toledo for good. He had come to Spain hoping for royal commissions, but Philip the Second disliked the one large picture he tried for him, and El Greco spent the rest of his life working for the city instead, for its churches, its clergy, its gentlemen. We do not know who this young man is. He has a gaunt face, a thin nose, a small moustache and a pointed beard, and a narrow white ruff above dark clothes whose high collar looks almost like a cassock, which is why some have taken him for a churchman. El Greco builds the pale face out of tiny touches of orange and pink laid on with the tip of the brush, a way of working that dates the picture firmly to the 1580s.