Francisco Pacheco

Around 1620 Velazquez was barely past 20 and still working in Seville, in the orbit of the man long thought to look out from this canvas: Francisco Pacheco, the painter and theorist who had trained him and, in 1618, become his father-in-law when Velazquez married his daughter Juana. The stiff white ruff helps fix the date. Spain banned such collars in 1623. You can already see the young painter studying a face the way he later would at court, the flesh built up in warm, toasted tones, the look held rather than posed. Within three years he had left Seville for Madrid to paint Philip the Fourth.