Velazquez, DIEGO DE SILVA, was born at Seville, 1599, the son of Juan Rodriguez de Silva and Geronima Velazquez. His father was a cadet of the noble Portuguese family of Silva, but, like Gongora and others, he gave the preference to his mother's name, an old and well-known Seville one. Properly speaking, Velazquez was a self-taught painter. He studied under Herrera 'el Viejo,' a man of marked originality, but of a temper and manners that drove away pupils as fast as his ability attracted them. What Herrera really taught Velazquez was how to teach himself.
He used to set his pupils to make bodegones, 'cook-shop studies' of meat, fish, loaves, melons, pots and pans, and the like, and thus it was that Velazquez acquired the power that manifests itself in all he did, of seeing what he had to paint and painting what he saw with unerring firmness and truth. His second master was Pacheco, Herrera's opposite in many ways, a feeble, conventional painter, but a man of some culture and refinement, whose greatest merit, perhaps, is that from the first he recognised his pupil's genius, and worshipped it to the last. But Velazquez was only nominally his pupil; he followed his own course of instruction, passing from still-life to life models, the peasant lad whom he hired as a study, or the faces and figures he found in the streets and market-places of Seville. In 1622 he visited Madrid, and was kindly received by his fellow-townsmen, Fonseca, by whose advice he returned the next year, bringing with him as a specimen of his work one of his Seville street studies, the famous 'Water-seller,' now in Apsley House, presented by Ferdinand VII. to the Duke of Wellington, who had intercepted it at Vittoria on its way to France in Joseph Bonaparte's carriage. By Fonseca he was introduced to Olivares, and by him presented to the king, who commissioned him to paint his portrait, the first of some forty in which he painted Philip IV. youthful, elderly, on foot, on horseback, hunting, praying, in armour, in velvet, head, bust, half-length, full-length, and made him, so far as paint and canvas could, the best-known monarch in history. The portrait was a complete success, and Velazquez was appointed pintor de cámara, with a salary of 20 ducats a month over and above the price paid for his pictures. He was thus at the outset relieved from the necessity of seeking the patronage of the church, and painting altarpieces, martyrdoms, and miracles. Fortune for once sided with genius in his case. Even the course of true love ran smooth with him, for when, in obedience to what seems a law in the lives of painters, he fell in love with his master's daughter, Pacheco, who by all precedent was bound to send him packing, accepted him gladly for a son-in-law. In the same year (1623) Charles, Prince of Wales, during his hair-brained wooing at Madrid, sat to him for his portrait; and in 1627, by the king's order, he painted 'The Expulsion of the Moriscos' in competition with Caxes, Carducho, and Nardi, the prize being the office of usher of the chamber, which was unhesitatingly awarded to Velazquez by the judges, Mayno and Crescenzi. In 1629 he obtained leave of absence to enable him to improve his acquaintance with Italian art, and spent two years in Venice, Rome, and Naples. On his return fresh honours and emoluments were bestowed upon him, and a studio close to the royal apartments assigned to him, where the king used to spend some hours daily watching the progress of his works. He was in Italy again in 1648-50, this time with a commission from the king to purchase works of art. In 1652 he was appointed Aposentador Mayor, a high dignity, the bestowal of which posterity has had reason to lament, for the duties took him away from his painting-room, and undoubtedly shortened his life. It fell to him, ex officio, to direct the arrangements for the marriage of the Infanta with Louis XIV., but more particularly the erection and decoration of the pavilion on the Isle of Pheasants in the Bidasoa, where the ceremony was to take place; and a tertian fever contracted there carried him off, a week after his return to Madrid, 6th August 1660.
Velazquez may be said to have been all but a pictor ignotus until the beginning of the 19th century. While the works of other great painters, who painted for churches, monasteries, and uncrowned heads, passed from time to time into the market and were scattered broadcast, his remained for the most part royal property, and only to be seen on palace walls, in the Alcazar of Madrid, the Buen Retiro, the Pardo, or the Escorial. To this in a measure they owed their preservation from the military art-collectors of 1808-10, who were bound to respect pictures that belonged to the heritage of Joseph Bonaparte; but doubtless insensibility to their merits was also a protection, for Velazquez offered little temptation to men whose taste had been formed by David. The transfer of the royal pictures to the Museo del Prado at Madrid was virtually a revelation of Velazquez, and it caused his outlying works to be eagerly sought after by collectors of all nationalities. Mr C. B. Curtis reckons up 274 attributed to him, of which no less than 121 are to be found in the United Kingdom, more than half of them being in London. France and Austria possess twelve each, Italy ten, and Russia and the United States seven each. In quality as well as quantity Velazquez is better represented in England than elsewhere, Madrid of course excepted. Good examples of his early work are to be found in the 'Water-seller' and in the 'Adoration of the Shepherds,' and 'Christ in the House of Martha' (National Gallery), painted under the influence of Ribera and Tristan, before he had settled down to a style of his own; and of his maturer powers in the 'Boar-hunt,' and the portraits of Philip IV. (National Gallery), Innocent X. and Quevedo in Apsley House, Philip IV. and Olivares in Mr Holford's gallery, and others in Lord Ellesmere's, Lord Lansdowne's, the Duke of Westminster's, and at Dulwich. The best of all, however, and, no doubt, the finest Velazquez outside the walls of the Madrid Museo, is the portrait of Admiral Pulido Pareja in the National Gallery, painted, like most of his greater works, with brushes of a length that enabled him to stand at the distance from which he meant it to be seen, and so to produce effects that Palomino justly calls 'miraculous.' To any one properly placed the story of the king's reprimand addressed to the portrait will not seem incredible. But it is only at Madrid that Velazquez can be seen in the full variety of his powers, a master in portrait, genre, landscape, animal, and, in fact, every branch of painting except the marine. Philip IV. was too true a lover of art to restrict him to the functions of a court-painter, and Velazquez apparently was allowed a free hand to paint such subjects as took his fancy. His court-pictures, the grand equestrian portraits of the king, Olivares, Prince Baltasar Carlos, and the like, are the more conspicuous, but the more characteristic and perhaps more interesting are the portraits of the truhanes, jesters, and odd characters that figure in catalogues and guidebooks under arbitrary titles, or else the nicknames of the originals, 'Menippus,' 'Esop,' 'Barbarossa,' &c. These, and his matchless series of dwarfs, were clearly subjects chosen for their own sakes, painted con amore, and treated in the spirit of a hidalgo Hogarth. But if he is to be compared to any man it is to his compatriot Cervantes, as an exponent of Spanish realism and Spanish character. It is sometimes said that sacred subjects and female beauty were beyond his reach, and that he could paint nothing that he had not before his eyes. And yet no painter ever painted a more profoundly pathetic Crucifixion than the one in the Prado, or two more charming figures than the 'Meninas' in the marvellous picture named after them, or a more thoroughly dramatic scene than the 'Surrender of Breda,' which might be a scene from a historical play by Shakespeare transferred to canvas.
See Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura (1649; reprinted 1866); Palomino, Museo Pictorico (1715-24); Ford, Velazquez (Penny Cyclopaedia), Handbook for Spain; Head, Handbook of the Spanish and French Schools of Painting (1848); Stirling, Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848), Velazquez and his Works (1855); C. B. Curtis, Velazquez and Murillo, a descriptive Catalogue (1883); Justi, Velazquez und sein Jahrhundert (1888; Eng. trans. by A. H. Keane, 1889); R. A. M. Stevenson, The Art of Velazquez (1895).—In France and England the name is usually spelt Velasquez.