Sunday, February 3, 2019

Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) - Later Paintings (To 1660)

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Philip IV on Horseback
1634-35
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Gaspar de Guzmán on Horseback
ca. 1636
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Court Buffoon called El Primo
ca. 1636-38
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid
 
Diego Velázquez
St Anthony Abbot and St Paul the Hermit
ca. 1633
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

"Because most of Velázquez's work was carried out for the king, it remained in palaces where few people saw it.  Not until the upheavals caused by Napoleon's Peninsular War (1804-14) was some of his work dispersed throughout Northern Europe.  In the nineteenth-century, his paintings made an enormous impact upon artists, and to the present day Velázquez is remembered as the painter's painter."

– from an essay by Everett Fahy on the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Don Baltasar Carlos with a Court Dwarf
1632
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Juana Pacheco (possibly)
ca. 1632
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velázquez
Coronation of the Virgin
ca. 1635-36
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velázquez
Surrender of Breda
ca. 1635
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velázquez
The God Mars
ca. 1638
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velázquez
The Needlewoman
ca. 1640-50
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Diego Velázquez
The Spinners
1655-60
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Infanta María Teresa
ca. 1651-54
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Mariana of Austria, Queen of Spain
ca. 1652
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Velázquez
Portrait of Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress 
1659
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

"Alas! ladies and gentlemen, Art has been maligned.  . . .  She is a goddess of dainty thought – reticent of habit, abjuring all obtrusiveness, purposing in no way to better others.  She is, withal, selfishly occupied with her own perfection only – having no desire to teach – seeking and finding the beautiful in all conditions and in all times, as did her high priest Rembrandt, when he saw picturesque grandeur and noble dignity in the Jews' quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks.  As did Tintoret and Paul Veronese, among the Venetians, while not halting to change the brocaded silks for the classic draperies of Athens.  As did, at the Court of Philip, Velázquez, whose Infantas, clad in inaesthetic hoops, are, as works of Art, of the same quality as the Elgin marbles." 

– James McNeill Whistler, from a lecture known as Mr. Whistler's Ten O'Clock (1885)

Diego Velázquez
Mercury and Argus
ca. 1659
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid