Portrait of the Earl of Arundel and his grandson Thomas

In 18th-century Spain this armoured man with a boy at his side was taken for Guzman el Bueno, the commander who defended Tarifa in 1294 and whose son was killed by the besiegers. The picture hung in the house of the counts of Niebla, a title carried by the family that traces itself back to him, and the reading stuck. It was engraved as Guzman twice, in 1787 and again in 1791, for a published collection of portraits of illustrious Spaniards. The sitter is in fact Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, the English diplomat and collector who died in 1646, and the child in rose satin is his grandson Thomas, born in 1627. When the canvas reached the Prado in 1926 as part of the Niebla bequest, the register still called it a supposed Guzman, with the correction added in the same line. Since 1975 the museum has treated it as a workshop copy of the van Dyck kept at Arundel Castle. The carved-looking border of leaves and heraldic beasts is painted on the canvas itself, and the motto on its scroll, Concordia cum candore, belongs to the picture rather than to any frame.