Equestrian Portrait of Margarita of Austria: Difference between revisions

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Spanish. (September 2010) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Spanish article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 977 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Spanish Wikipedia article at [[:es:La reina Margarita de Austria a caballo]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|es|La reina Margarita de Austria a caballo}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The Equestrian Portrait of Margarita of Austria is a 1634 portrait of Margaret of Austria, Queen of Spain on horseback by Velázquez, originally shown at the Salón de Reinos and now in the Prado.

Velasquez had been commissioned to paint a series of five equestrian portraits of the royal family, Felipe III, his wife Queen Margaret of Austria, Felipe IV, his wife Elizabeth of France and their son Baltazar Carlos. This last was smaller than those of the other family members, as it was intended to be hung on a door and therefore viewed from a lower perspective.

As with the portrait of her husband, this portrait of Margarita evidences input from Velasquez' workshop. Velasquez retouched the work which his workshop produced, retouching the horse's harness in particular; this was originally very detailed. The same stroke fluidity can be observed in the redone head of the queen, but this process was reversed in the horse's mane and some portions of the landscape in the background, albeit hidden in the underlying technique of the painting. This may be Velasquez' work.

The figure of the queen appears in an ornate dress, adorned with two pieces of jewelry known to belong to the Austrians, the pearl known as "La Peregrina" and the square-cut diamond called "El Estanque". The horse, posed in the 'passage' gait, is facing left, in order to mirror the horse posed in Margarita's husband's portrait, which faces to the right.

• Velázquez , exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on this portrait (see index)