Rokeby Venus

The Rokeby Venus is a painting by Diego Velázquez showing Venus reclining before a mirror held by Cupid. It is his only surviving female nude.

Venus at Her Mirror: A subject in art showing the goddess Venus contemplating her reflection in a mirror. Velázquez makes the mirror the painting’s central device for connecting Venus and the viewer.
Diego Velázquez: A Spanish painter and leading court artist to Philip IV, celebrated for portraits and historical scenes. Velázquez painted the Venus, an exceptional subject within his surviving work.
Mary Richardson: A Canadian-born British suffragette who attacked Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery in 1914. Richardson’s slashing of the canvas made the painting a flashpoint in the suffrage campaign.
Male gaze: A way of analyzing visual culture in which women are presented as objects of heterosexual masculine looking. The painting’s exposed body and mirror invite debate about who controls the act of looking.
Baroque art: An artistic style associated with dramatic compositions, movement, and strong contrasts, prominent in seventeenth-century Europe. The painting’s controlled sensuality and spatial drama belong to the Baroque world.
Gaspar Méndez de Haro: A Spanish aristocrat and statesman who became a prominent art collector in the seventeenth century. The painting is commonly thought to have been commissioned for Méndez de Haro.
Emmeline Pankhurst: A British political activist who led the militant wing of the women’s suffrage movement. Richardson said the attack protested Pankhurst’s arrest and treatment in prison.
Female nude in art: The representation of unclothed women in visual art across different periods and cultures. The painting is a rare Spanish example of a longstanding European genre.
Mirror: A surface that reflects light to produce an image of objects before it. Cupid holds the mirror that directs Venus’s gaze toward an indistinct reflected face.
Marquis of Rockingham: The title held by British noblemen of the Watson-Wentworth family, including Charles Watson-Wentworth. The painting entered the collection of the family whose estate gave it the name Rokeby Venus.

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