It is from the canvases of Velasquez that we know the Spanish Royal Family and the aspect of the Court of Philip IV. as though we had lived there ourselves.  The painter was born in the south of Spain in the same year as Van Dyck, and seven years earlier than Rembrandt.  To paint the portrait of his sovereign was the ambition of the young artist.  When his years were but twenty-four the opportunity arrived, and Philip was so pleased with the picture that he took the young man into his household, and said that no one else should ever be allowed to paint his portrait.  Velasquez welcomed with gratified joy the prospect of that life-long proximity, although neither his earnings nor his station at all matched the service he rendered to his sovereign.  As the years went on he was paid a little better, but his days and hours were more and more taken up with duties at Court, and his salary was always in arrears.  He could not even reserve his own private time for his art, but as he waxed higher in the estimation of the King, the supervision of Court ceremonies, entrusted to him as an honour, deprived him of leisure, and at last brought his life prematurely to a close.

From the time when Velasquez entered the service of the King, he painted exclusively for the Court.  We have eight portraits by him of Philip IV., and five of the little Don Carlos, besides many others of the queens and princesses.  We can follow the growth of his art in the portraits of Philip IV., as we can follow that of Rembrandt in portraits of himself.  But while Rembrandt might make of the same person, himself, or another model, a dozen different people, so that it mattered little who the model was, Velasquez was concerned with a different problem.  In the seventeenth century almost any good painter could draw his models correctly, but Velasquez reproduced the living aspect of a man as no one else had done.  We have already spoken of the feeling of atmosphere that Cuyp and Peter de Hoogh were able to bring into their pictures.  Velasquez, knowing little or nothing of the contemporary Dutchmen, worked at the same art problems all his life, and at last mastered the atmosphere problem completely, whether it was the air of a closed room in the dark palace of Philip, or the air of the open country, as in our picture.  In this there is no bright light except upon the face of the little prince.  It is dark and gloomy weather, but if on such a day you were to see the canvas in the open air it would almost seem part of the country itself, as Velasquez’s picture of a room seems part of the gallery in which it hangs.