スペイン王フェリペ4世

Velazquez became Philip IV's court painter in 1623, when both men were young, and he painted the king again and again for more than thirty years. This is the last of those portraits, made around 1656, and the years show. Philip's face is heavy and tired, the eyes puffy, the famous upturned moustache the one thing still holding its old shape. By now his reign had been ground down by decades of war and the slow loss of Spanish power. Velazquez records him without flattery and almost without detail, the gold chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece suggested with a few loose flicks of the brush. The king seems to have liked it, since his workshop turned out copies of it to send as gifts.