La cucitrice

Look closely at this one and you can watch a painter thinking. The woman's face is worked up in full, soft light and shadow modeling every plane, but her hands and the sewing in her lap trail off into a few loose strokes, barely begun. Velázquez left it unfinished. By the years he made this, around 1635, he was court painter to Philip the Fourth in Madrid, spending his days on royal portraits and state commissions, and a quiet study like this was the kind of thing he did for himself, off the clock. He had already moved away from the hard shadows of his early Seville pictures toward this gentler light. You can still see the direction of his brush in the woman's collar, and the way the hand seems to move even though it was never resolved.