An excellent, detailed and illustrated biography of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, 1599-1660, whose artworks adorn the museums and palaces worldwide. "Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, the most admired--perhaps the greatest--European painter who ever lived, possessed a miraculous gift for conveying a sense of truth. He gave the best of his talents to painting portraits, which capture the appearance of reality through the seemingly effortless handling of sensuous paint. Because most of Velázquez's work was carried out for the king, it remained in palaces where few people saw it. Not until the upheavals caused by Napoleon's Peninsular War (1808-14) was some of his work dispersed throughout Northern Europe. In the nineteenth-century, his paintings made an enormous impact upon artists, and to the present day Velázquez is remembered as the painter's painter."--Everett Fahy Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847-1900) was a Scottish art critic, a cousin of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson and the brother of Katharine de Mattos.