View of the Garden of the Villa Medici

Around 1630 Velazquez was living in Rome, lodged for a while in the Villa Medici on a hill above the city, and he did something almost no one did yet. He carried his easel out into the garden and painted what was in front of him, in oil, on the spot. Most artists of the day made such quick outdoor studies only in pencil or ink. Here a couple of small figures stand under a stone arch, a cloth hung across it, a classical statue tucked in the shade, and the whole thing is brushed in loosely, as if the light might change before he finished. It reaches forward, by two centuries, to the way the Impressionists would work. He had come to Italy to study the great painters and ended up making one of the earliest landscapes painted purely from life.