Portrait of Manuel Silvela

Nobody can pin down when this was painted, and the argument turns on the sitter's coat and hair. Manuel Silvela was a young law professor from Valladolid who came to Madrid during the French occupation and accepted a judge's post from Joseph Bonaparte's government. His son, who wrote his life, said he took it to head off injustices against his neighbours. In 1813 he left for France with his family and stayed there. The traditional dating puts the portrait in those war years, around 1809. Other scholars have shifted it to Bordeaux in the mid-1820s, where both men were living in exile. The clothes and the hairstyle fit 1810 to 1813, and nothing in Silvela's papers records a sitting. He looks away past the edge of the canvas, which may mean a portrait of his wife once hung beside him.