Few artists are as well-known and admired as the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). His many portraits—the majority of them created in his role as court painter to King Philip IV of Spain—remain striking today, their beauty matched only by their remarkable psychological acuity. Velázquez painted people not as types, but as individuals, and that approach, combined with his skill, made his work both unique and absorbing.

This volume highlights one aspect of the Golden Age painter’s vast output: a group of masterly children’s portraits from the high-profile collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Beautiful reproductions of the paintings are accompanied by essays by renowned specialists that set his achievement in context and reveal his development as a painter.