Portrait of a Gentleman

Most of what Murillo painted in Seville was religious work for churches and convents, Virgins and saints on a large scale. Portraits were a small side of his output, and this one keeps its sitter's name to itself. The man wears the black clothes and broad black hat of a Spanish gentleman of the time, and nearly everything except his face sinks into a dark background. Light catches the forehead, the nose and the eyes. The Museo Soumaya in Mexico City points out how Murillo builds the head out of patches of light, much as Rembrandt was doing in Amsterdam in the same years, the early 1660s. The canvas is about 59 by 50 centimetres. Enrique Valdivieso, a leading specialist on Murillo, believes it was once larger and later cut down, possibly from a full-length portrait.