Las Meninas is famous because it looks like a royal portrait and refuses to behave like one. Velázquez painted himself at work inside the king's palace, with the five-year-old Infanta Margarita at the center and a small mirror on the back wall that shows her parents, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, most likely standing where the viewer stands.
The canvas is 3.2 meters tall, so the figures stand at nearly life-size. Velázquez is at the left with a brush in his hand, looking out at whoever is in front of the picture.
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Famous is a word the painting did not earn for a very long time.
For more than a century and a half after Velázquez finished it in 1656, almost no one saw Las Meninas. It hung in the private rooms of the royal palace in Madrid. A Cambridge University Press study of the painting says it was seen by few before 1819 and was little known. Even its name was missing: the inventories listed it as a portrait of the family of Philip IV.
I think that is the best reason to distrust the usual explanation. A clever mirror does not make a painting famous. People have to see it first, and for a long time almost no one could.
How few people ever saw Las Meninas?
Very few, and nearly all of them lived in the palace. The picture hung in the king's own summer office in the Alcázar of Madrid, where the royal inventory of 1700 places it. Antonio Palomino, a painter and biographer, wrote in 1724 that Philip IV went often to watch it being painted, and that the queen, the Infantas and the ladies of the court came too, as a delightful entertainment.
Palomino gave the picture a section of its own, the only work in his book to get one, according to the Prado. Few of his readers could have seen it.
In 1734 a fire destroyed the Alcázar. The painting was carried out and moved to the new royal palace, where it was recorded in 1776 in a room called the Sala de Conversación. It left the palace only in 1819, when King Ferdinand VII opened the royal collection to the public and the Prado was founded. The few outsiders who had got in before that were mostly painters.
What You'll Discover
What one painter told a king.
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Who sat down to copy it in 1879.
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