Velázquez was still a teenager when he painted this captivating work. It is dated 1618 which means that it was made shortly after he had completed his apprenticeship in his native Seville. The astonishing and utterly convincing realism is nothing like the dry and unimaginative painting of his teacher, Francisco Pacheco, and there seems little doubt that this picture was a very deliberate showpiece for the young artist, a public demonstration of his skill and a declaration of his artistic emancipation.

An Old Woman Cooking Eggs is one of a small group of paintings known as bode­gones (from the Spanish bodega for a cellar or inn) which were naturalistic kitchen or tavern scenes with prominent still lifes. There were artistic precedents for such humble, low-life subjects in northern European art which Velázquez could have known through engravings. There is also a parallel in contemporary Spanish novels which frequently depicted roguish heroes in everyday settings. One of the most popular of these, Mateo Alemán’s picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache, recounts the adventures of a young street urchin and includes a passage describing an old woman cooking eggs. But whichever artistic or literary sources form the context for this work, it is the sheer dazzling skill of the young painter that seems to be the real subject. The composition thrusts the objects forward out of the shadow, each one demanding our attention in turn; rough and smooth, warm and cold, hard and soft, metal and earthenware, the picture is a catalogue of contrasting textures and materials, running across the full range of our sense of touch.

Velázquez would soon move permanently to Madrid as court painter to the young King Philip IVof Spain. His portraits of the royal family and other members of the Spanish court and aristocracy are renowned for their humanity and psychological insight. In this painting, the old woman and the young boy were certainly painted from life but they do not interact and are devoid of expression or emotion. The human presence here is entirely upstaged by the tour de force at the centre of the composition which is the rendering of the eggs frying in a terracotta pot. Velázquez is said to have declared that he would rather be the first painter of common objects than the second in higher things. Illustrating his point, it could be argued that this pair of humble egg yolks, surrounded by thickening whites just starting to cook, is one of the most arresting pieces of painting in the entire collection of the Scottish National Gallery.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.