Retrato ecuestre del conde-duque de Olivares

Around 1636 the most powerful man in Spain was not the king but his chief minister, Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Philip IV had come to the throne at 16 and handed much of the real governing to Olivares, and by the 1630s his grip was enormous. Velázquez paints him the way you would normally only paint a monarch, high on a rearing horse, its front legs lifted off the ground, turning back toward a smoking battlefield as though he were directing it. He was no soldier, and that is rather the point. The pose lends a working politician the bearing of a victorious general. Velázquez, usually so restrained, lets the colour and movement run closer here to the grand manner of Rubens. Within a few years Olivares had lost the king's favour and was sent away from court.