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We know little about Velazquez's personality, reflecting, perhaps, his unobtrusive approach in his paintings. It has been suggested though, that the most significant element in Velazquez's life was his search for social approval, and eventually nobility, in a rigidly hierarchical, snobbish society. In 1658, after much intervention on his behalf from Philip IV, he finally achieved his aim, admission to the Knighthood of the Order of Santiago. This was as much an acceptance of Velazquez's petition for painting to be considered a liberal, or noble art, implied in visual terms in Las Meninas, as approval of Velazquez's family background and pure blood. Velazquez died in August 1660, still in the king's service, in Madrid; his wife Juana died six days later.
Velazquez' s work became most influential in the nineteenth century, mainly because most of his paintings, kept in the Spanish royal collection, weren't publicly accessible until then. Goya, however, was court painter in Spain in the late eighteenth century, and had close access to Velazquez's work. French painters Courbet and Manet saw his work in the mid 1800s when it came to France after Napoleon's victory in the Peninsular wars, and Manet studied Velazquez's painting in Madrid in 1865. Velazquez's work became crucial to the development of Manet's technique: admiring his revolutionary disregard for the conventions of perspective in the background of his portrait of the actor Pablo de Valladolid, Manet remarked that this was "perhaps the most astounding bit of painting ever done."
The Impressionists took the spontaneous casualness of Velazquez's brushwork and ran with it to the point where abstraction began. In the twentieth century, Francis Bacon admired Velazquez as "an amazingly mysterious painter," using Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X as a springboard for his own exploration of the human condition.
Velazquez's life and art sometimes seem contradictory. His work is acutely sympathetic to the socially and physically disadvantaged in a society in which he himself was desperate to succeed. Velazquez was working in the most vehemently and repressively Catholic country in Europe, but produced hardly any purely religious art (probably through a combination of choice and circumstance). His paintings seem to be simply about authenticity of experience, directness, and truth to the subject - but then there is the quizzical and controversial Las Meninas. Velazquez's work has been described by historian Arthur Danto as an "intermixture of "mystery and mastery, each uncanny in its own but connected way". Perhaps these paradoxes, like the conundrums of who is where and why in Las Meninas, contribute to our enduring fascination for Velazquez's work.
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