Portrait of King Philip II of Spain in the suit of armour of the Duke of Alba, with marshall’s baton and collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece,
oil on panel, 103.4 x 72.7 cm, framed

Provenance:
Important Spanish private collection.

Dr. Christian Beaufort-Spontin has identified the armour the king is wearing in the present painting as that of the Duke of Alba (depicted by Titian in a portrait of the duke in the collection of the Duchess of Alba). Until now it has not been possible to attribute the present portrait to a particular artist. This is mainly due to the fact that the court painters in the service of the Spanish Habsburg king increasingly adopted similar stylistic features in their practice. Several artists have been proposed as plausible authors: Juan Pantoja de La Cruz and his workshop or circle (S. Schroth, A. Jordan Gschwend, T. DaCosta Kaufmann, M. T. Cantaro), Adriaen Thomasz. Key and his circle (L. Ruiz Gómez, Prado, Madrid) or Martino Rota (J. de Maere). This official portrait of Philip II is likely to have been a gift from the Spanish court to a high-ranking personality and friend, probably a foreign sovereign. Dr. Eliska Fucikova has pointed out that similar portraits have survived in the collections of the Prince of Lobkowicz. These are considered to be by the hand of Juan Pantoja de La Cruz. The present painting was executed on oak, which is unusual for Spanish artists. However, there are several examples of Pantoja de La Cruz having used oak panels at least occasionally (compare his Saint Luke in the Bowes Museum of Art, Barnard Castle, Durham).

This is obviously a posthumous portrait of the king, although it seems to have been painted shortly after 1600, Philip’s appearance here is rather youthful. There are several possibilities as to the occasion which led to this portrait being painted. The two most likely events occurred in the early 17th century: the first being the fire of the Prado, which entailed a huge commission for Juan Pantoja de La Cruz, who was entrusted with decorating the ‘Galeria de Retratos’ with hundreds of portraits – a task he could only tackle with the assistance of his workshop and by making reference to earlier models (however, the quality of the present portrait of Philip II is far superior to these pictures). The second occasion relates to the political negotiations between King Philip III and the English King James I, which culminated in the conclusion of a treaty in London in 1604 and in the visit of an English delegation in Valladolid in 1605. In the course of these diplomatic efforts, it may have come to an exchange of portraits between the two sovereigns, but also between members of both delegations. De La Cruz could not cope with the great demand and in many cases was forced to deliver the pictures commissioned from him at a later date (cf. G. Ungerer, Juan Pantoja de La Cruz and the Circulation of Gifts between the English and Spanish Courts in 1604/5, in: Shakespeare Studies, ed. by J. Leeds Barroll, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998). It seems likely that in those days a variant of the portrait of the former arch enemy was painted either by De La Cruz for an English patron or by an English court artist, such as John de Critz I or Marcus Gheerardts II (see the Portrait of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury by Critz, which is similar in various respects). The portrait of Philip II may also be linked to the composition of the Somerset House Conference 1604 (National Portrait Gallery, London), which has alternately been attributed to Pantoja de La Cruz and his workshop and John de Critz. Each of the two artists only knew one party of the negotiators in person and thus both would have had to rely on painted models. This also holds true for the author of the present painting, who referred to Titian’s portrait of the Duke of Alba, for its armour and the positioning of the hands.