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Self-Portrait or Portrait of an Old Man is an oil-on-canvas painting by El Greco, likely dating to between 1595 and 1600. The work's distinction as a self-portrait has been widely debated by scholars for over a century. Identification as a self portrait is supported by the idea that the same figure appears several times in El Greco's oeuvre, aging alongside the artist. Critics of this work's identification as a self-portrait point to a lack of evidence to positively identify it as such. It shows the influence of Titian and Tintoretto, whose works El Greco studied in Venice. It is currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The first scholar to refute the identification as a self portrait was Paul Lafond in 1906, who cited a lack of evidence identifying the sitter as the artist himself. Lafond himself, however, identified the painting as Portrait of El Greco? in his 1913 book on the artist, possibly as a reference to the ongoing academic debate surrounding the piece. Elizabeth du Gué Trapier was the first scholar to refer to the painting as Portrait of an Old Man in 1925. August L. Mayer's 1926 argument for identification as a self portrait was generally accepted by scholars until Harry B. Wehle's 1940 catalogue which points to a lack of evidence connecting the work to Jorge Manuel Theotocopuli's inventory. Harold E. Wethey corroborated this argument in 1962, claiming that the sitter of the portrait does not resemble figures in other works by El Greco that are accepted by scholars to be self portraits.[ Another theory, posited in 1992 by Deborah Krohn, claims that the subject of the portrait may have been a relative of El Greco's. This is due to due to visual similarities between the sitter and El Greco's son, Jorge Manuel Theotocopuli.
Collezione : Toledan Art