Ritratto di Íñigo Fernández de Velasco

Murillo is remembered for tender Virgins and ragged Seville street children, so a stiff aristocratic portrait like this one is a rarer thing from his hand. He painted it around 1659. The sitter is Íñigo Melchor Fernández de Velasco, Constable of Castile, a grandee who sat on the councils of state and war and would later govern the Spanish Netherlands for the crown. For a long time no one was certain whom it showed, and it picked up the plain nickname the Gentleman of Seville. That name stuck through a court dispute over the picture in the 1980s. It entered the Louvre in 1985.