Prince Baltasar Carlos

The boy is Baltasar Carlos, heir to the Spanish throne, about nine years old when Velázquez painted him in 1638 or 1639. The portrait belongs to the years when a bride had been chosen for him in Vienna, his cousin Mariana, daughter of the Emperor Ferdinand III and of the prince's own aunt. She was three or four at the time. The plan held for years. Then in 1646, at 16, Baltasar Carlos died of a sudden fever in Zaragoza, and his father Philip IV, a widower by then, married the girl himself in 1649 to secure an heir for Spain. The bride promised to the son became the stepmother of his sister. The canvas is an old imperial possession, recorded in the Vienna gallery from 1816.