Baroque Across Europe: Spain, Holland, and France

In Spain, Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) served as court painter to Philip IV for most of his career, producing portraits of extraordinary psychological subtlety and technical freedom. His masterpiece, Las Meninas (1656), is a complex meditation on the act of painting itself, placing the artist, the royal family, and the viewer in an ambiguous, self-referential space that has fascinated critics for centuries. Earlier works such as The Surrender of Breda (1634-1635) and the sensuous Rokeby Venus (c. 1647-1651) reveal the range of a painter whose loose, atmospheric brushwork anticipated techniques that would not become common until the nineteenth century.