The Artist's Family

High on the left hangs a coat of arms with an arm swinging a mallet. In Spanish a mallet is a mazo, and Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo used the pun as his signature. The picture, painted around 1664, is a portrait of his household. In the left foreground stand four children from his first marriage, to Francisca, daughter of Diego Velázquez, who had died some years before. On the right are his second wife and her children. The family is gathered in a painter's studio, an arrangement that borrows from Velázquez's Las Meninas of 1656. The canvas reached the imperial gallery in Vienna in 1800. In 1809, when Napoleon's army took the city, it was taken to Paris with other pictures from the collection, and it came back in 1815, after his defeat.