Diego Velázquez
The sharp eye of the Spanish court.
Velázquez was court painter to Philip IV in Madrid. His loose, assured brushwork impressed the Impressionists two hundred years later.
Diego Velázquez was baptised in Seville on 6 June 1599. He was apprenticed to the painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco and in 1618 married his daughter Juana. His early pictures are so-called bodegones, kitchen scenes with people and objects. Old Woman Frying Eggs in Edinburgh and The Waterseller of Seville in London already show his sharp eye for light, surfaces and materials.
In 1623 he moved to Madrid and became court painter to the young King Philip IV. He stayed there for the rest of his life. When Rubens visited Madrid in 1628 he encouraged Velázquez to travel to Italy, which he did in 1629–31. In Rome, on a second journey in 1649–51, he painted Pope Innocent X, one of the masterpieces of portraiture, which is still in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj. He also painted The Rokeby Venus, now in London, his only surviving female nude.
At court he painted the royal family, but also the court jesters and dwarfs, with the same dignity as the princes. The Surrender of Breda of 1635 in the Prado shows a military victory in which the victor consoles the vanquished. His most famous work is Las Meninas of 1656, also in the Prado. The little Infanta Margarita stands in the centre with her maids of honour, and Velázquez himself stands at a large canvas. In a mirror in the background the king and queen can be seen. No one knows for certain what he is painting, and the picture has been debated for more than three hundred years.
Velázquez painted with loose, assured brushstrokes that look like blotches close up but from a distance become silk, lace and skin. He also rose in rank at court and became responsible for the furnishing of the palaces. In 1659 he was admitted to the distinguished Order of Santiago, and the cross on his chest in Las Meninas was added afterwards. He died in Madrid in 1660.
His works long remained in the royal collections and were unknown outside Spain. Manet called him “the painter of painters” when he saw them in the 1860s, and Picasso painted 58 variations on Las Meninas in 1957.