Diego Velázquez valuation
Las Meninas, the Rokeby Venus and the portraits of Philip IV, by the painter Manet called the painter of painters.
Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) was born in Seville and trained with the painter Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married.
What a work by Diego Velázquez is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) was born in Seville and trained with the painter Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married. His early kitchen scenes, such as An Old Woman Cooking Eggs in the Scottish National Gallery, brought Caravaggio's realism to Spain. In 1623 he became painter to Philip IV in Madrid and spent the rest of his career at court, painting the king, his family, his jesters and dwarfs, with two journeys to Italy, on the second of which, in 1650, he painted Pope Innocent X. The Rokeby Venus, his only surviving nude, is in the National Gallery in London, and Las Meninas, of 1656, is in the Prado. Manet called him the painter of painters.
Paintings by Velázquez are almost all in museums, above all the Prado, and very rarely come to market. The court demanded many versions of the royal portraits, which his workshop and his son-in-law Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo supplied, and copies were made for generations, so portraits of Philip IV and his family in his manner are relatively common. Telling his own hand from the workshop's, and an early version from a later copy, depends on technical examination and documented history, and the occasional rediscovery is debated for years before it is accepted.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
