Old Woman Frying Eggs

An old woman tends a pan of eggs cooking before our eyes while a boy approaches holding a melon tied with cord and a flask of wine; copper, ceramic, and glass gleam in the raking light. Velazquez painted this 'bodegon,' or kitchen scene, in Seville when he was barely nineteen, and the precocious naturalism astonishes - every surface and texture exactly weighed, the two figures locked in quiet, unglamorous concentration. Now in Edinburgh, it shows the future court painter of Spain already a master of the humble and the real.