Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Joseph’s Tunic (1630), Oil on canvas, 213 × 284 in

At the beginning of 1611, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660), then six months short of his twelfth birthday, entered a six-year apprenticeship with the painter Francisco Pacheco in Seville. In March 1617, the precociously talented teenager was accepted into the artists’ guild and, a year later, married Pacheco’s daughter. That’s when we first meet the painter in “Diego Velázquez” at the Grand Palais, Paris.1Organized jointly by the Réunion des musées nationaux and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the show is—astonishingly—the first monographic exhibition ever devoted to Velázquez in France. (A major retrospective was seen in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in Madrid at the Prado in 1989–1990, and a comprehensive survey was organized by the National Gallery, London, in 2006.) The Paris exhibition is a wide-ranging overview that traces the evolution of the Spanish master’s art from sober religious images and genre scenes made during his initial years as an independent artist to dazzling royal portraits painted at the very end of his life. The selection includes an impressive number of celebrated works but it also introduces unfamiliar pictures and paintings recently attributed to Velázquez—some securely, some with some controversy—for their own merits and to take advantage of the possibility of comparison with unquestioned autograph works. A few pictures by artists to whom the young painter may have responded or who may have