Doña Antonia de Ipeñarrieta y Galdós and Her Son Don Luis

Velázquez painted this around 1632, just back from his first trip to Italy and settled as Philip IV's court painter in Madrid. It was a private job, not a royal one. Doña Antonia was a widow who had remarried a crown lawyer, Diego del Corral, and Velázquez portrayed the couple as a pair, her with her small son on one canvas and her husband on another. The boy, Luis, was about four, dressed like a miniature adult in the heavy black the Spanish court favored. Velázquez gives them almost no setting, just a plain ground and a scrap of red curtain, and lets the faces and the quiet hands carry everything. The two portraits stayed together in the family's Basque palace for more than two centuries, and in 1905 a duchess left them both, still side by side, to the Prado.