Portrait of the duc de Benavente

El Greco spent the second half of his life in Toledo, in Spain, painting the city's clergy and nobility in his own stretched, flickering style. This is a portrait of a Spanish grandee, most likely Juan Alonso Pimentel, Duke of Benavente, who served around 1600 as the king's viceroy in Valencia. He stands in dark armor with a ruff at his throat, one hand resting near his sword, the whole figure lit against deep shadow. For a long time the attribution was uncertain, until a cleaning uncovered El Greco's signature on the canvas. The painting hangs today in Bayonne, in the French Basque country, in a museum built from the collection of the 19th-century painter Léon Bonnat.