Portrait of Don Luis de Góngora

In 1622 Velázquez, barely into his twenties and still working out of Seville, made his first trip to the royal court in Madrid. His teacher and father-in-law, the painter Francisco Pacheco, asked him to bring back a portrait of Luis de Góngora, the most admired and most difficult poet in Spain, by then soured by years of court disappointment. Velázquez caught him plainly, sharp-eyed and unsmiling against a dark ground, and the likeness was talked about all over Madrid. That kind of notice mattered: within a couple of years the young Sevillian was back at court for good as painter to the king. Pacheco later boasted about the picture in his treatise on painting.