Diego Velázquez

This type of scene is called a bodegón — Spanish for pantry — basically a kitchen snapshot with someone working in it. According to the museum's own notes, the woman here was likely enslaved, part of a household connected to Velázquez's own family. Nobody's ever put a name to her.

For a long time this hung under 'unknown Sevillian painter' — only fairly recently did anyone decide it's an early Velázquez, from before he'd really found his style. The purple cloth is apparently a deliberate touch too, a color tied to preparation, since John's whole story is about getting the way ready for someone else.

He served at the Spanish court for years after being brought there as an adult — apparently somewhere between an entertainer and a companion, depending who you ask.

The little girl in white is a Spanish princess, surrounded by her maids, a dog, and two court dwarfs who were apparently real people with names of their own, kept around for entertainment — which reads differently now than it must have then. There's also a small mirror on the back wall that, from what I can tell, reflects the king and queen, apparently right about where they'd have been standing to watch all this get painted.

A suffragette went at this with a small axe in 1914, in protest at Emmeline Pankhurst's arrest — it's said she was fed up with men queuing up to stare at it all day. It was patched up afterwards, and photos of the damage are apparently still floating about.

They say the pope who sat for this took one look at the original and called it 'too true.' This version's apparently one of several made around the same time — not the one that anecdote's usually attached to.

He's holding a paper pinwheel and, apparently, a tiny painted portrait of a woman in his other hand — read by some as a joke about how love never sits still. Calabazas was a real fixture at the court of Philip IV, and the full-length portrait format was usually saved for people a lot further up the ladder than a court jester.

This one was still in his studio when he died — the inventory afterward just calls it 'another head, of a woman doing needlework.' It's unfinished: the face is fully worked, the rest barely started.

This is apparently a working sketch — Velázquez roughing out how a soldier's back and stance might sit before he committed anything to canvas for a much bigger scene.