Portrait of a Gentleman

Start with the collar. That stiff cartwheel of starched linen is a lechuguilla, and in 1623 the Spanish crown banned it outright, ordering a plain flat collar in its place to stop the ruinous spending on starch and laundering. The museum dates this portrait 1618 to 1623, so the sitter is wearing the thing in its last legal years. Who he was, nobody knows. The Prado's own entry opens by saying exactly that. Where the picture has been, on the other hand, is recorded almost year by year. It belonged to the infante Sebastián Gabriel de Borbón until 1835, when the state seized his property because he had joined the Carlist side in the war over the succession. It spent 26 years in the museum of confiscated art at the old Trinity convent in Madrid, went back to him in 1861 after he came to terms with Isabel II, descended to his niece, who had married the duke of Veragua, the title carried by the descendants of Columbus, and was bought for the Prado in 1936. Up at the left, beside the man's head, a few thin red letters are painted into the background.