Jean Ranc

On Christmas Eve 1734 the old Alcázar of Madrid, the fortress-palace of the Spanish kings, burned through the night. The bells of a neighbouring convent rang the alarm and the city took them for the call to midnight mass. More than 500 paintings from the royal collection were lost. Las Meninas came out of the building damaged and was repaired later. The fire is generally said to have started in the rooms of the court painter, a Frenchman named Jean Ranc.

Ranc had been brought to Madrid in the early 1720s on the recommendation of his teacher Hyacinthe Rigaud, the great portraitist of Louis XIV, whose niece he had married. Philip V of Spain wanted French portraits of his family and Ranc supplied them, including a group of the whole royal household, and at the end of the decade he was lent to the Portuguese court in Lisbon.

He had a hard time of it with rival painters in Madrid, his eyesight was failing, and he died in the city in 1735, a few months after the fire.