Cleaned Up, Dubious Met Canvas Is Declared A Velazquez

“Experts had reason to doubt [its] authorship: Decades of varnish had discolored the canvas so much that its palette looked far darker than that of other paintings by Velazquez.” But the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent cleaning of “Portrait of a Man” revealed under “yellowed varnish and poor retouching … all the marks of Velazquez’s hand.”