An Old Woman Cooking Eggs
Diego Velazquez (1599 to 1660) · 1618
An elderly woman in a white headscarf sits by a glazed earthenware pan in which two eggs are turning from clear to white in hot oil. She holds a wooden spoon and an egg, and looks out past a boy who has brought a melon and a glass flask of wine. On the table are a brass mortar, a knife, onions, a red pepper and a jug, each painted as if it mattered as much as the people. It is a kitchen scene, a bodegon in Spanish, and Velazquez painted it when he was eighteen or nineteen years old in Seville.
Look at the eggs. Velazquez has caught the exact moment when the albumen sets, a translucent film with a white skin creeping across it, and he did it with a few strokes of paint. The light falls hard from the left, carving the woman's face and the boy's cheek out of the dark, and every surface answers to it differently: the dull glaze of the pan, the shine of the brass, the soft fuzz of the melon, the glassy flask. The two figures do not quite look at each other, which gives the scene its strange stillness.
The painting came to the gallery in 1955 and is one of the earliest works by Velazquez in any museum. It shows what he could already do before he moved to Madrid and became painter to Philip the Fourth: take humble people and ordinary things and give them the dignity of a religious picture. Scholars have suggested the same old woman appears in his Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in London, and the boy in his Waterseller of Seville. Whether or not they were models he knew, they are among the most present human beings in seventeenth century art.
Did You Know? Velazquez signed no date on the picture, but the year 1618 was found written on the canvas during cleaning.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.