Felipe de Borbón y Farnesio, Infante of Spain, Duke of Parma

Van Loo's portrait of Felipe de Borbón, Infante of Spain and future Duke of Parma, dated 1739, was painted during van Loo's Madrid court period when he had full access to the Spanish royal family. The Infante Felipe, second son of Philip V and Elisabeth Farnese, was twenty-one years old at the time of this portrait and would spend the following decades in pursuit of the Italian duchy his mother had planned for him, eventually becoming Duke of Parma in 1748. The Prado's holding of this portrait places it within the collection that most comprehensively documents the Bourbon dynasty's visual self-presentation in the eighteenth century, including multiple generations of royal portraits by van Loo and his predecessors. The Spanish Bourbons used portraiture as a tool of dynastic communication across European courts, and a portrait of a young infante at twenty-one would have circulated as part of the diplomatic and matrimonial negotiation that was the permanent business of eighteenth-century royal families.

Young male royal portraiture required van Loo to balance the formal grandeur of state presentation with the representational needs of a subject whose face still showed youth. His modeling of Felipe's features is careful but idealized, presenting a handsome young aristocrat rather than an unvarnished individual study. The military or court dress would have been rendered with the textural precision van Loo brought to all royal costume, differentiating each material layer with appropriate technical variety.