Küchenszene

Velazquez was still a teenager in Seville when he painted this, barely started in the trade. Seville in 1618 was Spain's gateway to the Americas, the richest and most crowded city in the country, and a major slave market. The young woman bent over her pots was almost certainly enslaved. Slavery was ordinary in the households Velazquez knew, his own included. He gives her the whole foreground and lavishes attention on the copper pot, the garlic, the brass mortar and the white cloth, painting cheap kitchen things with the seriousness usually saved for saints and kings. This kind of picture had a name, a bodegon, a pantry scene, and it was where the future court painter first learned to make ordinary light look solid enough to touch.