卵を焼く老女

Velázquez painted this in 1618, in Seville, when he was about eighteen or nineteen and fresh out of his apprenticeship. Nobody in Spain was painting kitchens like this yet. The whole picture is an old woman frying eggs and a boy holding a melon and a flask, and Velázquez pours everything he has into the ordinary things around them, the eggs just setting in hot oil, the dull shine of a brass mortar, the glaze on an earthenware pot. These plain kitchen scenes had a name in Spanish, bodegones, and this kind of close, patient realism was new here and got him noticed fast. Look at how the light falls, cool and even, catching the rim of the white bowl and the woman's lined hand. Within a few years he would be painting the king in Madrid.