The Geographer

In December 1899 the Museum of Fine Arts paid a New York gallery 3,000 dollars for this canvas. It had come from London, from a house in Kensington Palace Gardens belonging to Baron de Reuter, the title held by the family of Paul Julius Reuter, founder of the news agency, who had died earlier that year. Ribera's name was attached to it for a long time. The museum now lists it more carefully, as the work of a follower of Ribera, someone who painted in his manner and whose own name is lost. The subject is one that manner made popular, an ancient kind of thinker shown as a worn old man in a plain dark coat, here with a pair of compasses and a globe. Across the Atlantic, in the museum at Rouen in northern France, another smiling old man beside a globe was also known for generations as The Geographer and was once given to Ribera too. That picture turned out to be by Velázquez.