Infanta Margarita Teresa in a Blue Dress

Velazquez finished this portrait in 1659, a year before his death, and it is one of the summits of his late style. From across the room the dress is solid silver and blue brocade; step close and it dissolves into flicks and streaks of paint that barely touch each other. The face, by contrast, is painted with tender precision. Look at the way the silver braid on the bodice is suggested by a few zigzags of white, and at the shadow that softens the right side of the skirt against the brown background. The impressionists two centuries later studied exactly this freedom.

Margarita was promised from infancy to her uncle and cousin, the future Emperor Leopold the First in Vienna, and portraits of her were sent regularly from Madrid so that her betrothed could watch her grow. That is why the Kunsthistorisches Museum owns three Velazquez portraits of the same girl, in pink at about three, in white at about five, and here in blue at eight, hanging together in this cabinet. She married Leopold in 1666, bore him four children and died at twenty one. The blue dress portrait was sent to Vienna in 1659 as a gift from Philip the Fourth, which makes it one of the few Velazquez paintings that has never changed hands.

Did You Know? The museum owns three portraits by Velazquez of the same little princess, sent from Madrid at different ages so her future husband in Vienna could see her grow up.