Head of a Man in Profile

In 1618 Velazquez was a teenager in Seville, not yet 20, freshly out of his apprenticeship and newly married to his master's daughter. He was painting kitchen scenes and street people, ordinary Sevillians caught in strong raking light, in the same years he made the old woman frying eggs and the water seller. This is a head from that world, a plain man seen in profile, studied for its own sake rather than for any story. There is no grand subject here, just close attention to a real face and the fall of light across it. Within a few years he was summoned to Madrid to become painter to the king, and he left this kind of anonymous face behind.