Saint Jean-Baptiste dans le désert

Velazquez was barely into his twenties in Seville when he painted this young Saint John alone in the wilderness. He had trained in the workshop of Francisco Pacheco, a local painter and teacher whose daughter he married in 1618, and he was still years away from the royal court in Madrid that would make his name. You can see the schooling in it. The saint is a real Sevillian youth with bare, dirty feet, lit sharply against deep shadow, the reed cross and a lamb at his side marking who he is. It has the plain, earthy naturalism of his Seville years. Soon after, a visit to the king's collection in Madrid would introduce him to Italian painting and begin to soften and refine his figures.