The Fountain of the Tritons in the Island Garden, Aranjuez

The fountain in this picture is still running, about 40 kilometres from where it was built. Philip the Fourth began fitting out the gardens nearest his palace at Aranjuez with fountains around 1654, and the first really monumental one was this marble group of three basins, finished in 1657, a date an inscription at its foot still gives. In 1846 the whole thing was taken apart and rebuilt in the Campo del Moro, the gardens on the west side of the Royal Palace in Madrid, where it stands today. The tritons that give it its name are the three half-human, half-fish creatures in the lowest basin, and you can measure the fountain against the people strolling in the foreground, who are far smaller than it. Those figures are the point as much as the water is. Aranjuez sits on the Tagus and the court spent about a month there every spring, and this canvas was painted for a room inside the palace, to hang with other views of royal gardens. The Prado dates it after 1657 and does not give it to Velazquez. Through part of the 19th century it passed as his; the museum now points instead to painters working around him, Juan Bautista Martinez del Mazo, his son-in-law, or Benito Manuel Aguero.