Diego Velázquez

Velazquez painted almost the whole of his adult life for one man. He came up in Seville, a sharp young talent doing kitchen scenes and street types, and at about 24 he was brought to Madrid and made a painter to Philip IV, king of a Spain that still ran half the world and was quietly beginning to lose it. He stayed at that court for the rest of his days, some 37 years, painting the king over and over as the face aged and the empire's fortunes sank.

The post was more than a studio job. Velazquez climbed the palace ranks until he was chamberlain, in charge of the royal apartments, work that ate into his painting time but gave him standing, which he wanted badly. In 1656 he set that whole world down in one picture, Las Meninas, the little princess Margarita surrounded by her maids and dwarfs, the king and queen caught as reflections in a mirror at the back, and the painter himself standing at a tall canvas, brush in hand, looking straight out at us.

On his own chest in that painting is the red cross of the Order of Santiago, Spain's grandest chivalric honor. He did not actually receive it until 1659, three years after he finished the work, and the old story says the cross was added later, perhaps by the king's own hand. He wore it for barely a year. Velazquez died in the summer of 1660, worn out after staging the lavish festivities for a royal wedding on the French border.