Don Cristóbal Suárez de Ribera

Velazquez painted this in 1620, when he was about 21 and still working in Seville, years before Madrid and the royal court made his name. The sitter, Cristobal Suarez de Ribera, was a Sevillian priest who had founded a religious brotherhood, its emblem visible at the left, and he was also godfather to Juana Pacheco, the daughter of Velazquez's teacher, whom the young painter had just married. Suarez de Ribera was already dead by the time this was made, so the face is built up from memory and older likenesses rather than from life. Even so, the dark ground and the plain, searching realism already point toward the painter Velazquez would become.