Portrait of a Man

Black clothes and a plain white collar were not this man's taste, they were the law. In 1623 Philip IV banned the elaborate ruff and replaced it with the flat starched collar called the golilla, and for the rest of the century Spanish men were painted in that uniform sobriety. The Prado's old inventory simply called this canvas the gentleman in a golilla. He stands almost life-size, nearly two metres of canvas, beside a side table covered with red cloth, and his long hair places the portrait in the second half of the 17th century, around 1660. Murillo was then the leading portraitist in Spain outside the royal court in Madrid. Nobody knows who the sitter was; a name was proposed in an article of 1997, and the museum has kept the neutral title. It was bought for the Prado by the Ministry of Education in 1941.