El príncipe Baltasar Carlos

Around 1635 the whole Spanish succession rested on this child. Baltasar Carlos was born in 1629, the only son of Philip the Fourth to survive infancy, and the courts of Madrid had sworn him heir before he was three. He would die at 16, in Zaragoza in 1646, leaving his father without one. The Prado catalogues the painting as the work of Velazquez's workshop rather than of Velazquez himself. Beside the boy the museum records a dog, a goldfinch, and a round glass vase on a conical foot holding tulips, roses, marigolds and snowball flowers. The canvas came to the museum in 1958 as a gift from the archaeologist and art historian Manuel Gomez-Moreno, and it does not hang in the Prado. It is on long-term deposit at the Museo de Historia de Madrid.