The Supper at Emmaus

When it was painted

In the spring of 1622, Velázquez, twenty-two years old, left his hometown of Seville for his first trip to Madrid, the capital. He was already a rising young painter in Seville. At home he had a wife and two small daughters. His wife, Juana, was the daughter of his teacher, the painter Francisco Pacheco, and the two had married in 1618.

That first trip did not win him a post at court. He came home with a portrait of the poet Luis de Góngora instead. Then, in 1623, the king's powerful favorite, Olivares, called him back. Velázquez painted a portrait of the young King Philip IV, and the king made him his own painter. At twenty-four, a painter from the provinces had stepped into the royal court.

This picture was made in the space between those two years. In Seville he had painted kitchens, meals, and ordinary people in strong light and deep shadow. The Met sees in this canvas the influence of Caravaggio, the Italian painter whose dramatic lighting spread across Europe in those years.

The date of this picture was argued over for a long time. Some scholars placed it later, toward the end of the 1620s. In 2005 the Met's own journal published a whole article on dating this one painting, and the museum now places it in 1622–23. The canvas belonged to the New York department store owner Benjamin Altman, and it came to the Met through his bequest in 1913.

Look again. The two disciples throw up their hands in shock, but Jesus alone keeps a calm, still face. A young painter caught between a Seville kitchen table and a king's court put that quiet face and those startled hands into one picture.