Prince Balthasar Charles—or Baltasar Carlos in Spanish– (b. 1629) was the only son of King Philip IV of Spain and his first wife, Elizabeth of France. He was the heir to the Spanish throne and because he was such a beautiful child, he was beloved at the Spanish court. He is kind of a minor player in the vast and confusing and interrelated group that comprised the 17th century European monarchy, but he has become immortalized because he was the subject of a series of portraits painted by Velazquez (1599 – 1660).
I love Velazquez, and I especially love how much he clearly loved to paint this beautiful boy. Velazquez painted a bunch of portraits of him, beginning when the prince was two, until he was sixteen. In the prince’s later years, you can see the famous prominent Hapsburg chin (which I blogged about here), but he remained beautiful—at least as Velazquez saw him.
On October 5th, 1646, when the prince was sixteen, he fell ill with a fever—probably smallpox—and died four days later.
On a side note, in the first painting, the two-year-old prince is the one in the red sash wearing a dress (I blogged about boys in dresses here), and yes, that is a court dwarf in the foreground. Philip IV was especially fond of dwarfs, and more than a hundred lived at his court.
I thought I’d post some of these paintings (all via Wikipedia), just because I love them and want you to love them, too.
