Portrait of an unknown Englishman

Nobody knows who he is. Van Dyck painted him in England around 1635, down to the knee, in black, an old man with grey hair, side whiskers and a long beard, wearing what the catalogue calls a collar in the old style. Almost all his English sitters are still named, because the whole point of those pictures was whose face they showed. This one lost his name somewhere. The canvas was already in Florence by 1704, hanging in the Tribuna of the Uffizi, the small octagonal room where the Medici put the things they rated highest, and it stayed there until 1780, when it crossed the river to Palazzo Pitti. Scholars have set it beside his portrait of Sir Thomas Chaloner, an English official of the same years, which is now in St Petersburg.