Portrait of a Young Girl

In 1899 the Prado opened a gallery devoted to Velazquez, and the catalogue printed for it moved this small portrait, together with the companion picture of a second girl, out of his work and into the column of attributed pieces. For most of the 19th century the two had passed as Velazquez, reproduced in monographs on him, and this girl was said to be one of his daughters. The German scholar Carl Justi ruled that out on the evidence of her clothes, which are cut to a fashion of decades later. The name that stuck came from Diego Angulo in 1971. He matched these features to the cherub faces in Antolinez's documented religious paintings, the same round heads that crowd his Immaculate Conceptions. The question has stayed open. In the catalogue of the 2015 Velazquez exhibition in Paris the picture is listed as attributed to Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo, Velazquez's son-in-law.