Ritratto d'uomo

Around 1630 Velazquez was painting for Philip the Fourth in Madrid, and the king was building a new pleasure palace, the Buen Retiro, that needed pictures by the roomful. This unfinished head of a dark-haired man looks very like a face that gazes out from the crowd in his Surrender of Breda, one of the large scenes made for that palace, so it may well be the study he worked that face up from. It could even be Velazquez himself. For a long time the museum doubted the picture was his at all, until a cleaning in 2009 stripped away a greenish film and brought back the quick, sure brushwork underneath. A list of his works drawn up after his death mentions just such a half-length, left unfinished, which may be this one.