Autoportrait

Velázquez painted very few faces we can be sure are his own. Apart from the man looking back at us from inside Las Meninas, this head is the one self-portrait scholars broadly accept, which makes it rare. It is plain to the point of severity: a dark, empty ground, the face lit and everything else left in shadow, no badge or setting to say who he is. And who he was, was the most powerful painter in Spain, for decades the court painter to King Philip the Fourth, running the royal collection and eventually the king's own household. There is disagreement about exactly when he set down his own features here, somewhere around the 1640s. The Valencia museum holds it today, and a near-twin version, differing only slightly, hangs in San Francisco.