Young Spanish Nobleman

By the time this young man sat for him, Velázquez had been painter to Philip IV for several years, installed at the Madrid court while still in his twenties. In 1629 he set off for Italy to study the masters there and came back early in 1631, and the museum dates the portrait to about that year, painted either in Italy or just after his return. The sitter's name is lost. He wears the dark dress of the Spanish court, his right arm bent and the hand resting on his hip, and he looks straight out at us. The museum points to the hands and parts of the collar, laid in with a few well-placed strokes and then left alone, an early sign of the unfinished look that becomes so striking in Velázquez's work from the 1640s on.