El almuerzo de los campesinos

Velázquez painted this in Seville around 1618, when he was still a teenager and barely started as a master. It belongs to a kind of picture the Spanish called a bodegón, an everyday scene built around food and drink. Three men sit close at a table over a plain lunch. One leans in mid-sentence with his mouth half open, an older man tips his cup for a refill, and the light picks them out sharply against a dark ground. That deep shadow was new in the city just then, brought by prints and word of Caravaggio in Italy. On the white cloth you can count the props the young painter set himself to study: bread, a lemon, a carrot, some fish, and a copper vessel catching the light.