Diego Velázquez was a Spanish painter, born in Seville in 1599. He spent most of his life in Madrid as court painter to King Philip IV, and he died there in 1660.
He painted Las Meninas, the portrait of Pope Innocent X and the Rokeby Venus, and painters from Manet to Francis Bacon learned their trade from his work.
In Las Meninas, Velázquez painted himself on the left of the picture, brush in hand, standing near the king's little daughter. On his black jacket is a red cross. It is there today, but it was not there when he finished the picture in 1656.
The cross is the badge of the Order of Santiago, one of Spain's old orders of knighthood. Its knights wore it, shaped like a sword, on their clothes, and it marked them as nobles before the whole court. Velázquez was admitted only in 1659, and to get in he had to be described as a servant of the king rather than a working artist.
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The painting hung in the royal palace, so the cross could be added on Philip's command. Antonio Palomino, who wrote the first full life of Velázquez in 1724, reported that the king ordered the cross added after Velázquez died, and that some say Philip painted it himself.
Long before any talk of knighthood, he had started out as an apprentice in his hometown. Around 1611 he entered the workshop of Francisco Pacheco, a Seville painter who also wrote about art, for a six-year apprenticeship. Another future master, Alonso Cano, later a leading painter and sculptor in Granada, joined in 1616.
In Seville, painting was a trade run by a guild. Only a painter who passed its examination could open a workshop of his own and sign contracts, and Velázquez passed his guild examination in 1617, as his six years ended.
The workshop had become his family. In 1618, when he was about eighteen, he married Pacheco's daughter Juana, and Pacheco later wrote that he gave her to his pupil for his virtue and his promise.
His first paintings show kitchens and taverns, the scenes of food and ordinary people that Spaniards called bodegones. In An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, dated 1618, a woman bends over her pan while a boy carries a melon and a flask. Every egg and every glint on the copper is painted with hard precision.
The Waterseller of Seville
Around 1620 he painted an old, ragged water seller handing a glass of water to a boy. A single drop runs down the huge earthenware jar in front of them.
The two figures stand in deep shadow, with a strong light falling on their faces and on the glass. Painters of the time kept such contrasts for saints and martyrs, not for a man who sold water in the street.
What You'll Discover
What his first royal portrait won him.
Who traveled with him to Rome.
Whether the pope really flinched.
Who the mirror really shows.
What the Order wanted to know.
Why a suffragette took a cleaver to Venus.