A group portrait of three figures at half-length. The man on the right with a long grey beard and skull cap is a self-portrait of Titian. The other two figures are probably his friends – the man in the centre wears a high collared red coat with a fur stole over his left shoulder and is holding a letter; the man on the right looks younger than the other two and wears black and brown. The picture is thought to have been created in Titian’s studio by several artists, at least one of whom was Titian’s pupil. It is an amalgamation of portraits attributable to Titian, but a certain lack of engagement is betrayed by the artist's failure to reconcile the different directions of lighting in the prototypes. The head of Titian is a replica (with simplifications in costume and omission of the hands) of an autograph but unfinished self-portrait in Berlin. The sitter in red in the centre has been identified as Andrea de’ Francheschi, Chancellor of Venice, on the basis of several portraits and engravings connected to Titian. The figure on the right is a replica of a portrait, painted about a decade earlier, now in the Kress collection, deposited in the Young Museum, San Francisco. In the Kress portrait the sitter holds a letter inscribed ‘Di Titiano Vecellio singolare amico’, but the identity of the friend is unknown. This figure was only revealed after the picture was cleaned in 1957; inventories suggest that it had been painted out before the picture was acquired by Charles I and several copies of the picture in English private collections and a pen-sketch in the V&A, made when the picture was at Windsor, show the centre and left-hand figures only.