Very good condition on old lining, period but not original frame. From 19th century German collection (re: old etiquette on frame verso: “Spanische Schule VII Jahrhundert”; Munich art trade ca.1985; private collection, New York). A well respected advocate of the sober realism advocated in Madrid by the generation of his teacher Eugenio Cajés, and later openly admired by the young Velazquez upon his arrival in Madrid. The modern assessment of Lanchares’ work is largely based on his three important paintings in the Prado as most others remain either lost or still undiscovered in private hands. The attribution of this painting to Lanchares, and its proposed dating in the early 1610s, was based on the near identical portrait types seen in the Adoration of the Shepherds dated 1612 in the Prado. For illustrations of the Prado paintings, Pacheco’s account of Velazquez’s appreciation of Lanchares and Lanchares’ candidacy for Painter to the King, cf. Alfonso É. Pérez Sanchez, Pintura Barroca en España (1600-1750), Madrid, 1992; 6th ed. 2010, pp. 96-97; cf. also the fundamental

corpus of data and illustrations given by Diego Angulo Iñiguz and Alfonso Perez Sanchez, Historia de la Pintura Española: Escuela Madrileña del Primer Tercio del Siglo XVII, Madrid, 1969, pp. 260-265 including chronology, provisional listing and some illustrations of the eighteen paintings then known by Lanchares.

A recent note on the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Prado by Letitia Ruiz Gómez corrects the older birth and death dates to the briefer span of 1586-1630, and connects Lanchares’ earliest style with the influence in Spain of the Genoese Cambiaso. Cf. L.R.G.,

“Adoración de los pastores (1612),” Museo Nacional del Prado: Memoria de Actividades 2003, Madrid, 2004, pp.34-35.