The Head of an Old Man

This is not a finished picture but a working one. A bearded white-haired man was painted from life, on paper, sometime between 1618 and 1620, and the sheet was later glued to a wooden panel to preserve it, which is why the thing is only 45 by 34 centimetres and half a centimetre deep. Studies like this were stock in an Antwerp workshop. You painted a head you liked, kept it, and when a commission needed an apostle or a river god you had a face on hand that had actually been in front of you. The Prado owns a second, closely related head by the same painter, catalogued as P1491 and slightly larger, and the two were probably made for the same purpose.