I bought this book years ago at a local charity shop, but have yet to read it. I thought it might be useful for a reading challenge that I'm doing this year so I got it out, and it doesn't seem to be registered, oddly. I'm registering it now, anyway.

I quite enjoyed this book. I am a lover of art and I have an interest in at history, but this story was new to me. Going into this read I familiar, in a peripheral way, with Velazquez, but I don't know a lot about Baroque art or Spanish art specifically so this book introduced me to some other artists of that time and place. I thought the book was moving and intriguing, and I really appreciated the author's note at the end which delineated known facts from her own suppositions and provided her own comments on why she felt this story should be shared at the time when she wrote it (mid 1960s).

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this book just yet, but I will keep it around for a while first. Actually, I plan on ordering a replacement copy before I let it go because I discovered while reading that this copy is missing a page here and there. I managed to get through it with the help of Internet Archive where I was able to access scans of the missing pages, but I am definitely going to replace the copy before letting it travel.