José Antolínez

Madrid in the 1660s had a subject that would not go away, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin standing on a crescent moon in a rush of cloud and angels. Painters turned them out by the dozen for convents and private chapels, and José Antolínez, a carpenter's son baptised in the city in 1635, made some of the finest of them. The Prado keeps one dated 1665.

He was known at court for being difficult. Contemporaries describe a proud, quarrelsome man with a low opinion of his rivals, which did not stop him building an excellent clientele. One of his odder pictures shows the other end of that trade, a dealer in a bare room among the canvases he is trying to sell, painted around 1670 and now in Munich.

Antonio Palomino, the painter who collected the lives of Spanish artists a generation later, says Antolínez died in 1675 of a fever brought on by exertion and wounds after a fencing bout. He was 39.