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'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.