Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Philip IV

Diego Velázquez
Philip IV
c. 1623-28
Prado

The greatest Spanish art-collecting king was Philip IV (1605-1665) who ruled for more than forty years in the middle of the 17th century. Yesterday we watched him buying fifteen of the best pictures now to be found in the Prado from the English murderers of his fellow-king, Charles I.

Diego Velázquez
Philip IV
c. 1626-28
Prado

Gaspar de Crayer
Philip IV in Parade Armor
1628
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Peter Paul Rubens
Philip IV
c. 1628-29
Hermitage

Gaspar de Crayer
Philip IV on Horseback
c. 1628-32
Prado

Diego Velázquez
Philip IV
c. 1631-32
National Gallery, London

Diego Velázquez
Philip IV in Hunting Dress
1633
Prado

Diego Velázquez
Philip IV on Horseback
1634-35
Prado

Diego Velázquez
Philip IV on Horseback
c. 1635
Pitti Palace

Diego Velázquez
Philip IV
1644
Frick Collection

Diego Velázquez
Philip IV
1653
Prado

Philip's reign coincided with the career of Spain's greatest painter, Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). By the 1650s when both painter and monarch were showing their ages, Philip had begun to avoid posing for further portraits. One of the last images Velázquez made of him is the indistinct reflection (side by side with the Queen's) in the mirror on the back wall within the well-known painting below. In its day, this was a portrait of the couple's only living child and heir, the five-year-old Infanta Margarita. A few years later a little brother was born, but by then Velázquez was dead. When Philip IV himself died in 1665 the little boy became King of Spain at age three. His older sister, the Infanta Margarita, traveled to Austria at age 15 and married her uncle, the Holy Roman Emperor. She died in childbirth at age 21.

Diego Velázquez
Las Meninas
c. 1656
Prado