Artworks

Las meninas

Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor)

Artwork · Diego Velázquez · 1656 · oil painting · Museo del Prado

Velázquez painted the scene in 1656 in the Cuarto del Príncipe of the Alcázar in Madrid: the Infanta Margarita with her maids of honour, dwarfs and a mastiff, the painter himself at a large canvas, and in the mirror the faces of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria. Antonio Palomino devoted a section of his lives of Spanish painters (1724) to it alone; the name Las Meninas first appears in the Prado’s catalogue of 1843.