Portrait of a Man

This is the oldest painting on linen in the Mauritshuis. It is dated 1561, and the Latin at the upper left, Antonius morus pingebat, means Antonis Mor was painting it. Painters borrowed that tense from the Roman writer Pliny, who said the old Greek masters signed that way so a work would read as never quite finished. Even with the signature, the museum catalogues the picture as Mor and studio, meaning hands from his workshop are thought to have worked on it alongside his own.

The sitter's name is lost. He wears a pale doublet with gold-coloured sleeves, a small ruff and several heavy gold chains, which the museum takes as signs of wealth and high birth. The painting was bought in 1889 at the Paris sale of Eugène Secrétan, the French copper magnate whose collection went under the hammer that summer after his business collapsed.