Lecture 3 - Philip IV of Spain: Still Waters Run Deep?

The reign of Philip IV, 1621 - 1665, will forever be seen through the eyes of a single artist, Velazquez. The young king was 16 when he succeeded his father, Philip III in 1621, and in 1623 he appointed the equally young Velazquez as his court painter, who would capture the Spanish court in all its formality over the coming decades. This, the last of the truly 'Habsburg' Philips, would see Spain's so-called 'Golden Age' end as its powers were curbed with the loss of Portugal in 1640 and it accepted the loss of the northern part of the Spanish Netherlands for ever in 1648. That said, this was truly a golden period for the growth of the Spanish royal collections, not least via the opportunities provided by the 'Sale of the Century', when the English parliament sold off the works of art owned by Charles I, many of which are now in the Prado. Indeed, Philip was not the only Habsburg buying English-owned works of art as his Austrian cousin, the Archduke Leopold, ruling what was left of the Spanish Netherlands, was equally active on the art market and his collections would form the core of another monument to the Habsburg 'eye', Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum.