Museum Collections

Thomas Jefferson Bryan acquired this painting, which he believed was by the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez, from the collection of R. W. Meade--a Philadelphian and a United States government employee who bought the painting in Spain. In fact, it is a very good studio copy after Velasquez's full-length "Portrait of Queen Mariana" in the Prado, Madrid. It has been suggested that this very fine copy may have been painted by Velasquez's son-in-law Juan Bautista Martinez Mazo. The sitter, Dona Mariana of Austria (1634-1696), married her uncle, Philip IV (1605-1665), to preserve Hapsburg control of Europe. Bryan believed that their daughter, the Infanta Margarita, portrayed in Velasquez's "Las Meninas," was the sitter in this portrait.