Winner of the 1996 HarperCollins Fiction Prize Yesterday in my studio, the desire came upon me. the desire to paint both girls naked. the pregnant Queen with her Vesuvian belly hiding beneath the swirls of Persian silk the colour of hearth-fire and the other, the stepdaughter, sitting quietly beside her, the infanta with the serious eyes who neither smoulders nor glows. Madrid, 1650: the painter Velazquez becomes obsessed by the twelve-year-old infanta he’s been commissioned to paint, a child on the brink of becoming a woman. Around them swirls the life of the Hapsburg court, rich and exotic, a palace of birth, love and loss. As the painter struggles with his portrait, the infanta’s story must also be told.A vivid, sensual tale of art and life set in seventeenth-century Spain.