#mirror

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.