Portrait of a Man

Nobody knows who this man was. His black clothes and the shape of his hat point to a churchman, and the Museum of Fine Arts dates the canvas to about 1576, which makes it one of the last portraits Jacopo Bassano painted. Portraits were only ever a small part of his work, and here he spends little on the costume beyond a row of buttons running down the bluish black. The light goes to the head: the soft beard, the eyes turned away in thought, and a swollen artery standing out above the man's right eye, painted as plainly as the rest of the face. In America the picture began its life in a famous house. By 1917 it hung in Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had lived for 45 years. In October 1921 three of his children, the painter Ernest Longfellow and his sisters Alice and Annie, gave it to the museum. Ernest died that November.