02 works, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, Simone Leigh's Las Meninas, with Footnotes. #70

Simone Leigh

Las Meninas/ Lady-in-waiting, c. 2019

Terracotta, steel, raffia

Private collection

Simone Leigh (born 1968) is an American artist from Chicago born to Jamaican parents who works in New York City. She works in various media including sculpture, video installation and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. More on Simone Leigh

Simone Leigh's Las Meninas seems to be a take off on Diego Velázquez's painting of the same name from 1656, see below. Diego Velázquez was the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age. Las Meninas's enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and creates an uncertain relationship between the viewer and the figures depicted. Because of these complexities, Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting.

The painting shows the young Infanta Margaret Theresa surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. More on Las Meninas

Diego Velázquez

Las Meninas, c. 1656

Oil on canvas

318 cm × 276 cm (125.2 in × 108.7 in)

Museo del Prado, Madrid

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (baptized June 6, 1599 – August 6, 1660) was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV, and one of the most important painters of the Spanish Golden Age. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and commoners, culminating in the production of his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).

From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Velázquez's artwork was a model for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that time, famous modern artists, including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon, have paid tribute to Velázquez by recreating several of his most famous works. More on Diego Velázquez

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