Jan Thomas van Ieperen

In December 1666 the Spanish infanta Margarita Teresa, the small girl Velázquez had painted in Madrid and whose portraits had been sent ahead to Vienna as she grew, arrived there to marry her uncle, the emperor Leopold I. The celebrations ran on into 1667 and included opera and a horse ballet staged in the palace courtyard. A Flemish painter at the court painted the two of them in their stage costumes.

That painter was Jan Thomas, born at Ypres in Flanders in 1617. He trained in Antwerp in the orbit of Rubens's workshop, became a master there around 1640, worked for the bishop of Mainz in the 1650s, and settled in Vienna. He made his living on cabinet-sized pictures and on prints, among them mezzotints, a technique invented within his own lifetime.