Portrait of a man with a lute

For years, visitors to Troyes met this man as a Spaniard. The museum showed him as a hidalgo tuning his guitar, a work by Velazquez, court portraitist in Madrid. A major exhibition changed the label. The instrument was read again as a lute, the hand behind it as Flemish, and the picture was reassigned to Peter Paul Rubens, working in Antwerp around 1610 to 1615. That moves the sitter north into Flanders and a generation earlier, into the years when Rubens had just returned from Italy and was building one of the busiest workshops in Europe. Even now the attribution carries some caution, and the catalogue reads attributed to Rubens rather than a certainty. The canvas reached Troyes in 1892, a gift from the widow of a local collector, Audiffred.