Portrait of a man, possibly Alonso de Herrera

El Greco painted this around 1600 in Toledo, near the end of his life, and by then his style had grown strange and severe. The colour is stripped almost to black and white, the figure stretched and still. The museum in Amiens received it as a portrait of Alonso de Herrera, but no one is certain who the man really was. The book in his hand and his raised, speaking gesture point to a scholar or a man of law rather than a courtier. The Cretan-born painter had settled in Spain decades earlier and spent his last years in Toledo. This canvas came to Amiens in 1890, a gift from two local brothers, the Lavallards, who left the museum much of its old-master collection.