Diego Velázquez

Diego Velázquez was court painter to Philip IV of Spain for thirty-seven years and painted Las Meninas, probably the most analysed picture in European art. Born in Seville in 1599 to minor gentry of Portuguese descent, he was apprenticed at eleven to Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married, and whose treatise records his early insistence on painting from life. His Sevillian works are bodegones — kitchen scenes with figures — painted in a dark tenebrist manner, of which the Waterseller of Seville is the best known. He went to Madrid in 1623, painted a portrait of the young king, and was appointed court painter immediately. The post gave him security, a salary, palace lodgings and a monopoly on royal portraiture, and it also consumed him in courtier duties; he ended his life as palace chamberlain, responsible for furnishings and travel arrangements. Rubens visited in 1628 and urged him to see Italy. Two long Italian journeys, in 1629-31 and 1649-51, loosened his handling completely. The portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted in Rome in 1650, is so unsparing that the sitter is said to have called it too true; Francis Bacon repainted it obsessively three centuries later. His mature technique abandons drawn contour for patches of tone laid side by side, so that form resolves only at a distance — Manet called him the painter of painters. Las Meninas of 1656 shows the artist at a huge canvas, the infanta and her attendants, and the king and queen reflected in a mirror at the back, leaving the viewer standing where the monarchs stand. He was made a knight of Santiago in 1659 and died in 1660.

• Lived: 1599 CE – 1660 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: painter