L'Adoration des Mages

Velazquez was 20 when he painted this, still in Seville and not yet the court painter he would become in Madrid. Instead of hiring anonymous models for the holy scene, he seems to have looked around his own household. The kneeling king with the careful, ageing face has the features of Francisco Pacheco, his teacher and father-in-law. The young Virgin is thought to be Pacheco's daughter Juana, whom Velazquez had just married. The dark, plain naturalism is the Seville he grew up in, where the Church wanted saints who looked like ordinary people you might pass in the street. The painting first hung in a Jesuit novitiate in the city, its earliest recorded home.