Diego Velázquez was the Baroque painter who created The Surrender of Breda and became a leading artist of Spain’s Golden Age.
Velázquez painted the large oil on canvas around 1634–1635 for Madrid’s Buen Retiro palace. It depicts the 1625 surrender of Breda during the Eighty Years’ War, when the Dutch governor Justinus van Nassau hands the city’s key to Ambrogio Spinola, the Genoese commander serving Spain.
The painting is often called Las lanzas, or The Lances, after the forest of Spanish spears behind Spinola. Velázquez presents the defeated Dutch with dignity rather than showing humiliation, making the scene notable for its humanity as well as its military subject. That restrained treatment is one reason the work is regarded as a masterpiece of Spanish Baroque painting.
A common mix-up is confusing Velázquez with El Greco, another major painter associated with Spain. El Greco worked mainly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, while Velázquez was the leading court painter to Philip IV and served at the Spanish court in Madrid.