Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez was a Spanish painter who is considered to have been the country's greatest baroque artist on canvas. He, with Francisco de Goya and El Greco, forms the great triumvirate of Spanish painting.

Velázquez was born in Seville on June 6, 1599, the oldest of six children; both his parents were from the minor nobility. Between 1611 and 1617 the young Velázquez worked as an apprentice to Francisco Pacheco, a Sevillian Mannerist painter on canvas who was also the author of an important treatise, El arte de la pintura (The Art of Painting, 1649), and who became Velázquez's father-in-law. During his student years Velázquez absorbed the most popular contemporaneous styles of painting on canvas, derived, in part, from both Flemish and Italian realism.