Retrato de Francesco Marcelliano de Barea, capuchinho

The man in the coarse brown habit was a Capuchin from Ávila who spent his working life in Antwerp keeping track of other people. Francesco Marcelliano de Barea and his brother Eliodoro were posted to the southern Netherlands, which Spain governed from Brussels, and part of their business was reporting to Madrid on where the loyalties of the Flemish nobility lay. Rubens painted both brothers around 1630, in years when Spanish authority in the province rested on negotiation and information as much as on garrisons. Barea was about 30 here, and the rough weave of the habit is set against a young face with the beginning of a smile in it. He died in 1658. The portrait of his brother is in a New York collection, and this one is among the very few Rubens portraits in French public museums.