This painting changed the world.
It is one of two versions of the same scene painted in his late teens around 1620 by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, one of which is in the possession of the Dublin National Gallery of Ireland, the other in Art Institute of Chicago. There is a long dispute amongst art historians as to which is the first/better/original version of this painting - the sort of dispute that art historians can spend a lifetime pursuing - but there seems little doubt that they were both created by Velazquez and were amongst his first paintings.
The scene depicts a young woman bent over a wooden table with a few kitchen utensils arranged to her left and right hand sides. There is a pestle and mortar, some overturned but neatly stacked bowls, a towel draped over a basket hanging on the wall behind her and what appears to be a crumpled cloth in the foreground. The surface is otherwise clean and she has her hand on a jug which itself casts a shadow on the wall behind. There is no decoration on the walls but behind her, on her right-hand side and on the left of the picture a group of three bearded men can be seen at a table as if through an aperture in the wall.
The woman herself is shabbily dressed, the linen that makes up her overgarment of coarse dark material. She is a little disheveled, with her tunic open at the midriff showing a glimpse of the white undershirt beneath. Her hair is showing in wisps from under her bonnet which itself appears to be a grubby white and no longer new. Her features suggest she is African or of N. African descent and her gaze is off to her right - she appears to be caught in thought, pausing from whatever she has been doing staring blankly into nothing.
She is a kitchenmaid and has been cleaning up in the kitchen, presumably having just served the gentlemen in the room behind her. Perhaps she is about to return to bring them something else to drink or to replenish their cups. Or perhaps she has finished for the day and is about to shut down. But wherever she is in her routine she has been stopped dead in her tracks and is deep in thought or concentration. The slight turn of her head to her right suggests that she might be listening to the conversation of the men at the table through the aperture behind her. And indeed this delicious moment of realisation is exactly the one that Velazquez intended to capture, a moment pregnant with significance and from a wholly unexpected perspective. And therein lies the rub and the shock effect of the painting.
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