Filippo IV a caccia di cinghiali (La Tela Real)

In the 1630s, hunting at the Spanish court was not a chase through open country. Servants strung up a huge canvas fence, the tela real or royal cloth, in a forest clearing, drove wild boar inside it, and the king dealt with them while everyone watched. Velazquez painted exactly that. Philip IV sits on horseback near the centre, lance lowered at a charging boar, his chief minister the Count-Duke of Olivares beside him. Off at the edge the queen and her ladies follow it all from their carriages, at a safe distance. It is the largest landscape Velazquez ever made, nearly three metres wide, and it hung in the king's hunting lodge outside Madrid, the Torre de la Parada.