Diego Velázquez, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618

Diego Velázquez, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618, oil on canvas, Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

On a winter trip to Edinburgh with my parents a few years ago, my dad insisted that we visit The Scottish National Gallery and made a beeline for the Velázquez painting there, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs. He stood in front of it for quite some time as if transfixed, ignoring for much too long many of the other treasured artworks nearby. I had to agree that it was extraordinary. Painted when the artist was only in his late teens, it is a bravura work intended to show off his skill to potential patrons. And yet it is more than this; it manages to transcend the technical virtuosity on display. The Observer’s art critic, Laura Cumming (one of my favourite writers on art along with Julian Barnes) has written beautifully and unimprovably about this work, but I will offer a few more observations of my own below.

In Cumming’s book The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez, which intertwines the story of the re-discovery of a lost work by the artist with a biography of Velázquez’s life in art, it opens with a description of the writer’s first encounter with the artist’s supreme masterpiece, Las Meninas in the Prado, an experience that I shared when I too first visited Madrid.

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas 1656-57, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid

She describes how the figures in the painting seem as if they were there waiting to look back at you from across the centuries – a peculiar and moving sensation, as if you had just interrupted them in their activities, including those of the artist himself. There is a kind of sorcery in this achievement. As she puts it: ‘Because of Velázquez, these long-lost people will always be there at the heart of the Prado, always waiting for us to arrive; they will never go away, as long as we are there to hold them in sight. Las Meninas is like a chamber of the mind, a place where the dead will never die.’

Scholars have written endlessly about this painting, about its meanings, its themes, its meta-theatricality and it has intrigued and obsessed other artists too. Manet revered Velázquez – his painting The Tragic Actor was directly inspired by the Spanish artist’s Portrait of Pablo de Valladolid, but also the mirroring used in A Bar at the Folies-Bergère places the viewer as a participant in the scene just as Las Meninas does. Picasso made fifty-eight of his own different versions of Las Meninas, such was his fixation on it – you can see them at the Museo Picasso in Barcelona. However, I don’t pretend to offer any deeper insights on this towering work other than to connect it to the egg cooking painting I began with, which demonstrates that the sorcery was there from the beginning of Velázquez’s career.

In that early painting, the Carravaggistic chiaroscuro background lends drama to a humble bodegón scene, the kitchen of a modest eating house; it makes the depicted figures and the still-life objects into stage props, key-lit for our appreciation. The ‘action’ is in the detail. I love the shadow created by the knife resting on the dish in front of the old woman, the tip of which protrudes from the larger shadow beneath it. Then there are the red onion tendrils, the light on the brassware, positioned just so, the shine from the beaker held by the boy, whose forehead and sharply cut fringe highlight him as key supporting actor. Zoom in to his dirty fingernails, and the glint from their tips – it’s a painting that could hardly feel more real and alive.

Back to the lighting effects, it is the shadow beneath the cook’s cheekbone and the one beneath her eye bag that convey her age, together with her subtly drooping cheek and one-toothed mouth. Her advanced years are counterpointed by the boy’s youthfulness in this composition. It’s as if the painting is a worshipful study of the ages of man, from the embryonic eggs to pre-pubescence and on to old age. There is something reverential about this work – the table is like an altar (again as observed by Cumming) at which a wise old woman has become the celebrant, aided by her faithful altar boy.

I like the overspills from previous cooking that have left their mark on the sides of the stove and the similar drip marks left on the side of the earthenware jug. They speak of long and frequent usage and of experience.

And then there are the whites. The beautiful folds of the old woman’s headdress, and the way that her ear and hair are shown through its translucency and then the purer white of her underclothes. The white of the boy’s collar and at bottom right, the decorated white of the other jug, echoed in the white of that dish bearing the knife. The standout whites though, appearing as if the other whites were their satellites or triangulation points, are the whites of the eggs themselves, both the unbroken egg in the woman’s hand but also the white of the cooking albumen. The cirrus whorl of the just stirred water containing the egg mucus becoming cooked white is a kind of alchemy, that Cumming beautifully describes as like a metaphor for the mysterious process of making art itself, of transforming oil paint into an image of real life as lived. Yet remarkably, this is carried off with what appear, on closest examination, to be so few masterly small sweeps of the paintbrush; the economy of it, the astonishing conjuring trick of it!

So, what connects Las Meninas with the egg cooking painting, aside from the artist that made them both?  They almost bookend a career. The one is the ultimate court painting, nonpareil in the history of art, made just a few years before the artist’s death, and the other a boastful demonstration of ability and promise.  Las Meninas represents the final delivery on, and fulfilment of, that promise. I think that the two pictures share a supreme artistic self-confidence and self-awareness. Although Velázquez doesn’t appear, on the face of it, to show himself in the earlier painting as he does in the later one, there is a sense in which he does so but by suggestion. I think the artist has embodied himself in the two figures as if to say ‘you can see here relative youth (the figure on the left) like my own, but also a willingness to serve. Given time I will serve you up the wisdom and artistry of late maturity (the figure on the right) – give me a chance and I will cook you up some magic too.’

After our visit to the Scottish National Gallery all those years ago, we stopped off for brunch at a delightfully warm and welcoming café offering a tasty-looking menu. My Dad, of course, chose the poached eggs.