Portrait of the Cordoban intellectual and writer Don Enrique Vaca de Alfaro (1635-1685), bust-length, in a brown coat

This portrait is one of the first painted by Valdés Leal during his career in Córdoba. The sitter, Don Enrique Vaca de Alfaro, seems to have known the artist personally as a member of the city’s cultured and intellectual elite. He was a cultivated man, born into a noble family, who had penned of a number of historic and intellectual works including his panegyric Varones ilustres de Córdoba which detailed the lives of fifty-nine of the city’s most illustrious figures and a volume of poetry, the Lira de Melpómene, printed in the city in 1666.