Infanta Margarita Teresa

Velázquez painted Infanta Margarita Teresa around 1653, one of his earliest portraits of Philip IV's daughter by his second wife, Mariana of Austria. This very early portrait of the infant infanta shows her in the enormous formal dress of the Spanish court — the wide farthingale and elaborate adornment that transformed even small children into formal embodiments of dynastic power. The painting was sent to the Habsburg court in Vienna, where Margarita Teresa was destined to marry her cousin Leopold I, as part of the long-distance courtship of correspondence portraits that kept the betrothed parties acquainted over years of separation. Velázquez would paint her multiple times across the following decade, creating the most sustained record of a single royal subject's growth in the history of Spanish painting.

The child's pink silk dress is rendered with Velázquez's extraordinary late brushwork, the stiff fabric dissolved into shimmering passages of color while the tiny face peeks out with characteristic Habsburg features.