Deux jeunes hommes à table

Velazquez was about 19 or 20 when he painted this, still in Seville, years before Madrid and the royal court that would make his name. Pictures like it were called bodegones, kitchen and tavern scenes of ordinary people, often built around a few plain objects rendered with almost stubborn care. Look at what he lavishes attention on, the white crockery, the glint on a jug, the bread and fruit on a cheap table, all of it lit hard against the dark. The two young men matter less as individuals than as a reason to paint texture, light, and the weight of humble things. It hangs now in London, at Apsley House, the home of the Duke of Wellington, among Spanish paintings that reached Britain in the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars.