Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, at three-quarter length

Velázquez came home to Madrid early in 1631 after a year and a half in Italy, and this three-quarter-length portrait of Philip IV belongs to the months that followed. The king was about 26, ten years into a reign that his chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, was steering as much as he was. That same year Philip's sister María Ana arrived in Vienna to marry her cousin Ferdinand, heir to the imperial crown. From then on, likenesses of the Spanish royal family travelled regularly between Madrid and Vienna, the way two branches of the Habsburgs who rarely met kept track of one another's faces. This canvas is first documented in the Vienna gallery in 1772.