Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez is often thought of as a painter of people but his early pictures are best regarded as still lifes. Three Musicians (1616–1617) should be renamed “Bread on a table napkin,” Tavern Scene (1616–1617) should be called “Knife and bursting Pomegranate,” and An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618) “Eggs being Cooked.” These early paintings, all of them on view in this excellent exhibition at the National Gallery in London, organized by the American art scholar Dawson W. Carr, are remarkable not for the people in them but for the objects.[1] The party line on these early paintings is that they show how the young Velázquez was able to use his precocious skills to dignify the humble; he was not just a court painter. What we actually see are stereotypes; youngsters with crude simian faces and quaint oldies. Velázquez had not yet learned portraiture. It is the old woman’s eggs that matter, floating sunny side up in olive oil. Likewise The Water Seller of Seville (1618–1622) should be called, renamed, “Porous Pot,” for it is the pot that counts; you can even see the water seep through its pores so it can evaporate and keep cool what remains inside to be drunk. Even in Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary(1618), it is the fish, the shelled eggs, the pestle and mortar in the young woman’s hands, the spoon, and the onions that are memorable. In each case the