Portrait of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham

In May 1625 Rubens was in Paris for the marriage of Henrietta Maria of France to the king of England, and there he met George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the favourite of Charles I. He drew him in black chalk. Several painted portraits came out of that sheet, among them a large equestrian portrait destroyed by fire in 1949. This small Florentine panel sits in the same chain of versions, and the records disagree about where in the chain. The Palatina inventory calls it a copy after Rubens, the state catalogue prints Rubens as the author while its own text judges the handling weak and suggests the panel preserves a lost composition, Wikidata says workshop, and the label on the wall says Rubens. Three years after the Paris meeting, on 23 August 1628, John Felton stabbed Buckingham in a Portsmouth inn.