Portrait of Dominican (or Trinitarian) Friar

This friar has never been firmly named. The white tunic under a black cape belongs to both the Trinitarian and the Dominican orders, so even his community is uncertain, and for a time the sitter was identified as the painter-friar Juan Bautista Maino on little real evidence. The hand is unsettled too. The Prado gives the little canvas not to El Greco himself but to a follower, and dates it broadly between 1600 and 1650, close study having found clear technical differences from the master's late work. Whoever painted it worked almost without colour, building the gaunt face out of ochres and greys against a plain brown ground, so attention falls on the expression rather than the dress. The picture came out of a Madrid convent and entered the museum in 1916 with the bequest of the collector Pablo Bosch.