Philip IV, King of Spain

The canvas was purchased in London in 1944.

There is a suspicion that the painting is a fragment of a larger canvas, if you observe an object that seems to start in the lower right corner and that could be a chart. The painting must have been painted between 1628 and 1629, during Rubens's second trip to Spain. Sánchez Cantón, who considers it “masterful”, thinks “that it will be the study of nature, prior to the canvas of the Munich Museum”. The high quality and ease of execution invite us to distinguish it between known replicas. One of them is kept in the Royal Palace in Madrid and another was in the Duveen store, New York.