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Early life

Velázquez was born in Seville, Spain, the first child of Juan Rodríguez de Silva, a notary, and Jerónima Velázquez. He was baptized at the church of St. Peter in Seville on Sunday, 6 June 1599. The baptism most probably occurred a few days or weeks after his birth. His paternal grandparents, Diego da Silva and María Rodríguez, were Portuguese and had moved to Seville decades earlier. When Velázquez was offered knighthood in 1658, he claimed descent from the lesser nobility in order to qualify, however, his grandparents may have been tradespeople. Some authors have suggested that his grandparents were Jewish conversos. Rafael Cómez proposes Velázquez may have had Morisco lineage.

Raised in modest circumstances, he showed an early gift for art, and was apprenticed to Francisco Pacheco, an artist and teacher in Seville. An early-18th century biographer, Antonio Palomino, said Velázquez studied for a short time under Francisco de Herrera before beginning his apprenticeship under Pacheco, but this is undocumented. A contract signed on 17 September 1611, formalized a six-year apprenticeship with Pacheco, backdated to December 1610, and it has been suggested that Herrera may have substituted for a traveling Pacheco between December 1610 and September 1611.

Although considered a dull and undistinguished painter, Pacheco sometimes expressed a simple, direct realism, though his work remained essentially Mannerist. As a teacher, he was highly learned and encouraged his students' intellectual development. In Pacheco's school, Velázquez studied the classics, was trained in proportion and perspective, and witnessed the trends in the literary and artistic circles of Seville.

On 23 April 1618, Velázquez married Juana Pacheco (1 June 1602 – 10 August 1660), the daughter of his teacher. They had two daughters. The elder, Francisca de Silva Velázquez y Pacheco (1619–1658), married painter Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo at the Church of Santiago in Madrid on 21 August 1633. The younger, Ignacia de Silva Velázquez y Pacheco, born in 1621, died in infancy.

Velázquez's earliest works are bodegones (kitchen scenes with prominent still-life). He was one of the first Spanish artists to paint such scenes, and his Old Woman Frying Eggs (1618) demonstrates the young artist's unusual skill in realistic depiction. The realism and dramatic lighting of this work may have been influenced by Caravaggio 's work—which Velázquez could have seen second-hand, in copies—and by the polychrome sculpture in Sevillian churches. Two of his bodegones, Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha (1618) and Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus (c. 1618), feature religious scenes in the background, painted in a way that creates ambiguity as to whether the religious scene is a painting on the wall, a representation of the thoughts of the kitchen maid in the foreground, or an actual incident seen through a window. The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (1618–19) follows a formula used by Pacheco, but replaces the idealized facial type and smoothly finished surfaces of his teacher with the face of a local girl and varied brushwork. His other religious works include The Adoration of the Magi (1619) and Saint John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos (1618–19), both of which begin to express his more pointed and careful realism.

Also from this period are the portrait of Sor Jerónima de la Fuente (1620)—Velázquez's first full-length portrait —and the genre The Water Seller of Seville (1618–1622). The Water Seller of Seville has been termed "the peak of Velázquez's bodegones " and is admired for its virtuoso rendering of volumes and textures as well as for its enigmatic gravitas.