Note (return) — Chapter IX

In one picture, now at Vienna, Velasquez gives a glimpse of his family life at a time when it would seem that he had four sons and two daughters, so that the fortunate painter's home had not been free from one shadow—that of death, which must have robbed him of five of his children. In this pleasant picture, 'his wife dressed in a brown tunic over a red petticoat, sits in the foreground of a large room, with a pretty little girl leaning on her knees, and the rest of her children grouped around her; behind are the men in deep shadow, one of them, perhaps, being Mazo, the lover or the husband of the eldest daughter, and a nurse with a child; and in an alcove Velasquez himself appears, standing before his easel, at work on a portrait of Philip IV. This is one of the most important works of the master out of the Peninsula; the faces of the family sparkle on the sober background like gems. As a piece of easy actual life, the composition has never been surpassed, and perhaps it excels even "The Meninas," inasmuch as the hoops and dwarfs of the palace have not intruded upon the domestic privacy of the painter's home, in the northern gallery.' 28