Expeditions which led to Ponce de León's colonization of Puerto Rico, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar's colonization of Cuba, Hernando Cortes ' conquest of Mexico, and Vasco Núñez de Balboa's sighting of the Pacific Ocean were all launched from Santo Domingo.

Olivares commanded Velázquez to move to Madrid, promising that no other painter would ever paint Philip's portrait and all other portraits of the king would be withdrawn from circulation.

It displays a concentration of all the art-knowledge Velázquez had gathered during his long artistic career of more than forty years.

In a series of portraits of the late 1630s and 1640s — all now in the Prado — Velázquez painted clowns and other members of the royal household posing as gods, heroes, and philosophers ; the intention is certainly partly comic, at least for those in the know, but in a highly ambiguous way.

Carpentier wove elements of Latin American political history, music, social injustice and art into the tapestries of his writings, all of which exerted a decisive influence on the works of younger Latin American and Cuban writers like Lisandro Otero, Leonardo Padura and Fernando Velázquez Medina.

El Greco and Velázquez were both painters, the former most notably recognized for his religious depictions and the latter — now regarded as one of the most important figures in all of Spanish art — for his precise, realistic portraiture of the contemporary court of Philip IV.

Her bust, tightly encased in the bodice, her stiff farthingale and all her fashionable magnificence are rendered true to life by Velázquez, and at the same time he reveals them as a theatrical show concealing the girl's natural physical nature beneath the armour of courtly constraint.

The interior of the palace is notable for its wealth of art, in regards to the use of all kinds of fine materials in its construction and the decoration of its rooms with artwork of all kinds, including paintings by artists such as Caravaggio, Velázquez and Francisco de Goya and frescoes by Corrado Giaquinto, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Anton Raphael Mengs.

Velázquez was the longest-lived of them all.

Velázquez also supported passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 after initially denouncing it as a disaster for workers of all three countries.

Fidel Velázquez was the longest-lived of them all and one of the most conservative as well.

Velázquez also supported passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 after initially denouncing it as a disaster for workers of all three countries.

The Spanish portrait artist, Diego Velázquez ( 1599 – 1660 ), generally acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of all time, was born in Seville, and lived there for his first twenty-two years.

Incidentally, although Grabar appreciated and studied Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, he himself ranked " the king of painters " Diego Velázquez above them all.

Diego Velázquez, regarded as one of the most influential painters of European history and a greatly respected artist in his own time, cultivated a relationship with King Philip IV and his chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, leaving us several portraits that demonstrate his style and skill.

As a portrait painter Hals had scarcely the psychological insight of a Rembrandt or Velázquez, though in a few works, like the Admiral de Ruyter, the Jacob Olycan, and the Albert van der Meer paintings, he reveals a searching analysis of character which has little in common with the instantaneous expression of his so-called character portraits.

The most famous works are the two portraits of Francis I d ' Este, a sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and a canvas by Diego Velázquez.

Velázquez then painted the first of many portraits of the young prince and heir to the Spanish throne, Don Baltasar Carlos, looking dignified and lordly even in his childhood, in the dress of a field marshal on his prancing steed.

His impassive, saturnine face is familiar to us from the many portraits painted by Velázquez.

In these portraits, Velázquez has well repaid the debt of gratitude that he owed to his first patron, whom Velázquez stood by during Olivares's fall from power, thus exposing himself to the great risk of the anger of the jealous Philip.

Besides the forty portraits of Philip by Velázquez, he painted portraits of other members of the royal family: Philip's first wife, Elisabeth of Bourbon, and her children, especially her eldest son, Don Baltasar Carlos, of whom there is a beautiful full-length in a private room at Buckingham Palace.

Sargent's best portraits reveal the individuality and personality of the sitters ; his most ardent admirers think he is matched in this only by Velázquez, who was one of Sargent's great influences.

His estate included gifts from royalty, a large collection of paintings including works by Velázquez, Murillo and Jusepe de Ribera, as well as portraits of his royal patrons, and several of himself, one by his friend Jacopo Amigoni.

Velázquez painted portraits of Mariana and her children, and although Philip himself resisted being portrayed in his old age he did allow Velázquez to include him in Las Meninas.

He returned to Europe in 1901, where he visited Spain to study the painting of Velázquez and El Greco and traveled through Brittany, and the Netherlands to see portraits by his " heroes ", Frans Hals and Rembrandt.

Diego Velázquez, regarded as one of the most influential painters of European history and a greatly respected artist in his own time, cultivated a relationship with King Philip IV and his chief minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, leaving us several portraits that demonstrate his style and skill.

* Diego Velázquez: Several portraits of the Spanish royal family, a branch of the Habsburg, sent to Vienna.

His many portraits show the influence of Velázquez, Jusepe de Ribera and other Spanish masters, as well as Titian and Van Dyke, whose works he studied in the Prado.

Diego Velázquez | Velázquez's The Lady with a Fan ( Velázquez ) | The Lady with a Fan is purported to be a likeness of the duchess, although the features of the sitter differ remarkably from other extant portraits of Marie Aimée.

It contains paintings by Velázquez, Titian, Poussin, and Claude Lorraine, as well as an unrivalled series of 18th-century family portraits by artists such as Gainsborough, Reynolds, Vigee-Lebrun, Batoni, Angelica Kauffmann, Ramsay, Van Loo, and Hogarth.

The style originated in Spanish court dress of the 17th century, familiar in portraits by Velázquez.

Sánchez Coello was a follower of Titian, and, like him, excelled in portraits and single figures, elaborating the textures of his armours, draperies, and such accessories in a manner so masterly as strongly to influence Velázquez in his treatment of like objects.

Through the bust portrait of the king, painted in 1623, Velázquez secured admission to the royal service, with a salary of 20 ducats per month, besides medical attendance, lodgings and payment for the pictures he might paint.

King Philip wished that Velázquez return to Spain ; accordingly, after a visit to Naples, where he saw his old friend Jose Ribera, he returned to Spain via Barcelona in 1651, taking with him many pictures and 300 pieces of statuary, which afterwards were arranged and catalogued for the king.

Elisabeth of France had died in 1644, and the king had married Mariana of Austria, whom Velázquez now painted in many attitudes.

That effect has been variously interpreted ; Dale Brown points out an interpretation that, in inserting within the work a faded portrait of the king and queen hanging on the back wall, Velázquez has ingeniously prognosticated the fall of the Spanish empire that was to gain momentum following his death.

Velázquez originated from Seville and mutual contacts caused him to become known to Olivares, who came from the same region ; he was summoned to Madrid by the king in 1624.

The king and Velázquez shared common interests in horses, dogs and art, and in private formed an easy, relaxed relationship over the years.

Velázquez presents nine figures — eleven if the king and queen's reflected images are included — yet they occupy only the lower half of the canvas.

According to López-Rey, in no other composition did Velázquez so dramatically lead the eye to areas beyond the viewer's sight: both the canvas he is seen painting, and the space beyond the frame where the king and queen stand can only be imagined.

Several experts, including the former Curator of the Department of Renaissance and Baroque Painting in the Museo del Prado and current Director of the Moll Institute of Studies of Flemish Paintings, in Madrid, Professor Matías Díaz Padrón, suggest that this " could be a model " painted by Velázquez before the completed work which hangs in the Prado Museum, perhaps to be approved by the king.