Works by Diego Velázquez

Painter to Philip IV from 1623, Diego Velázquez went from the dark, exact kitchen scenes of his Seville youth to the freer, bolder brushwork of his late portraits.

Francisco Pacheco taught him in Seville, and in 1618 he married Pacheco's daughter Juana. His first pictures were bodegones, kitchen scenes with the still life pushed forward; the hard light of one, Old Woman Frying Eggs, may owe something to Caravaggio, perhaps seen in copies, and to the painted sculpture in Seville's churches. In The Waterseller of Seville an old man in a brown smock passes a boy a tall glass of water, and drops run down the ribbed clay jar in front of him. The Immaculate Conception, painted around 1618–19, follows Pacheco's scheme for the subject but gives the Virgin a local girl's face.

Philip IV sat for him in August 1623, and Olivares, the king's minister, then promised that nobody else would paint the king. In Italy in 1629–30 he swapped the dark red-brown ground under his paint for a light grey one, used for the rest of his life, and his colour turned cooler and silvery. Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan is among the first on it: the laurel-crowned god has come to expose a deception, and Vulcan's smiths, stripped to the waist, freeze at the anvil like workmen of the day. In the Equestrian Portrait of Philip IV, painted for the Buen Retiro palace, the king sits in profile, quite still, while his bay horse rears on its hind legs.

Portraits make up most of the works below, largely in browns. In Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress, from 1659, the silver braid on the skirt is a run of loose strokes, and the dabs of colour across the canvas settle into a fully solid space only from some way back. In the Portrait of Prince Philip Prospero of the same year a small white dog peers over a red chair, and red trim lifts the boy's pale dress out of a dim room; he died when he was barely four. Las Hilanderas, from his last years, tells Ovid's fable of Arachne with women spinning wool up front and, in a bright room behind, a tapestry after Titian, or more likely after Rubens's copy of him.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Museo del Prado, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Apsley House, National Gallery. Portrait: Diego Velázquez.