Diego Velázquez Prints
1599–1660 · Spanish · Spanish Baroque
Wall art by Diego Velázquez, restored in-house and printed to order on heavyweight matte fine-art paper.
13 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
About Diego Velázquez
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was baptised in Seville in June 1599 and apprenticed to the painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married. In 1623 he painted the young Philip IV, was appointed court painter and moved to Madrid, where he served the king for the rest of his life, rising through the household offices and receiving the knighthood of the Order of Santiago in 1659. Two journeys to Italy, in 1629 to 1631 and 1649 to 1651, loosened his handling; the portrait of Pope Innocent X, painted in Rome in 1650, is the fruit of the second. The Surrender of Breda of 1634 to 1635 and the Rokeby Venus of the late 1640s show his range, and Las Meninas of 1656, with the Infanta Margarita, her attendants, a dwarf, a dog and the painter himself at his easel, is the picture other painters have studied most. He died in Madrid in August 1660. Velázquez painted with strokes that look like nothing up close and resolve into silk, hair or air at a distance, a method that anticipates Manet by two centuries. That is precisely the quality that survives on a wall.