Diego Velázquez (1599 - 1660) was a Spanish painter and the leading artist of the court of King Philip IV, working in Madrid for almost four decades. [1] His portraits, mythological scenes and history paintings, executed with a loose and increasingly free brushwork, culminated in Las Meninas, and his example proved decisive for European painting from Goya to the nineteenth-century realists. [2]
Early life and Seville
Velázquez was born in Seville in June 1599, into a family of modest gentry. [1] At about eleven he was apprenticed to the painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco, whose workshop offered both technical training and access to the city's humanist circles. In 1618 he married Pacheco's daughter, Juana.
His Sevillian work consists largely of bodegones, kitchen and tavern scenes in which ordinary figures and still-life objects are rendered with unsparing naturalism and strong contrasts of light. Old Woman Frying Eggs and The Water Seller of Seville date from this period. [2]
Court painter
Velázquez moved to Madrid in 1623, painted a portrait of Philip IV, and was appointed painter to the king. The post carried a salary, lodging and an effective monopoly on royal portraiture. [1]
He travelled to Italy in 1629, studying Titian, Tintoretto and the Roman antiquities, and returned with a broadened palette and a new fluency in handling large compositions. The works of the following years include The Triumph of Bacchus, The Forge of Vulcan and The Surrender of Breda, a history painting that treats military victory as an act of courtesy rather than triumph. [2]
Alongside kings, queens and princes he painted the dwarfs and jesters of the household with the same gravity and attention he gave to the royal family, producing a group of portraits without close parallel in seventeenth-century art. [1]
Second Italian journey and late work
A second Italian journey between 1649 and 1651, undertaken to buy paintings and casts for the royal collection, produced the portrait of Pope Innocent X, admired immediately for its penetrating characterisation. The reclining nude known as the Rokeby Venus also dates from around this time, a rarity in Spanish art of the period. [2]
In 1656 he completed Las Meninas, which shows the Infanta Margarita and her attendants in the painter's studio, with the king and queen reflected in a mirror and Velázquez himself at a large canvas whose face is turned away. The picture's play with viewpoint, reflection and the position of the spectator has made it a permanent subject of art-historical and philosophical commentary. [3]
Later life and death
Velázquez rose steadily in the royal household, eventually serving as chamberlain of the palace, duties that consumed much of the time he might have spent painting. In 1659 he was admitted to the noble Order of Santiago, after an inquiry into his ancestry and into whether painting counted as manual labour. [1]
He organised the ceremonies on the Isle of Pheasants for the marriage of the Infanta Maria Theresa to Louis XIV in 1660, fell ill on his return and died in Madrid on 6 August 1660.
Legacy
Little known outside Spain for a century and a half, Velázquez was rediscovered by nineteenth-century artists; Édouard Manet called him the painter of painters. [2]
Pablo Picasso devoted a series of fifty-eight canvases to Las Meninas in 1957, and Francis Bacon returned repeatedly to the Innocent X portrait, evidence of a continuing hold on modern art. [3]
