Portrait of a Man

Nobody knows who this man is, and nobody has fixed when Degas painted him. The Museum of Fine Arts gives the canvas neither a date nor a sitter's name. What it does record is where the picture spent its first life. The name at the lower left is not a signature. It is a stamp, put on the works found in Degas's studio after he died in 1917, when his heirs sold the contents at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in four auctions. This portrait came up in the last of them, on 2 July 1919, as lot 7. The dealers Durand-Ruel bought it and moved it to their New York branch the next year. In 1924 it went to John Taylor Spaulding, a Boston collector of Japanese prints and French painting, and it reached the museum with the rest of his bequest in 1948.