Lost portrait of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham

This oil-on-panel portrait of George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, the favorite of King James VI and I, was painted around 1625 by the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and measures 60.9 by 47.3 centimeters. For decades it was believed to be merely a later copy of a Rubens original that had itself been lost, until the art historian Bendor Grosvenor examined the panel at Pollok House in Glasgow and conservator Simon Rollo Gillespie removed layers of old varnish and overpainting over roughly two months, revealing it to be Rubens's own lost original; Ben van Beneden, director of the Rubenshuis in Antwerp, confirmed the attribution. The rediscovery, announced in 2017, was documented in the BBC Four series Britain's Lost Masterpieces, and the painting remains on display at Pollok House in Pollok Country Park, the former home of the Stirling-Maxwell family. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/