Short answers, pulled from the story.
Diego Velázquez was baptized on the 6th of June 1599 at the church of St. Peter in Seville, Spain. He died on the 6th of August 1660 in Madrid. His wife Juana Pacheco was buried beside him within eight days of his death.
Las Meninas, completed in 1656, is widely regarded as Velázquez's masterpiece. The contemporary Italian painter Luca Giordano called it the theology of painting, and in 1827 Sir Thomas Lawrence described it as the true philosophy of the art.
King Philip IV of Spain was Velázquez's primary patron throughout most of his career. Velázquez painted at least thirty-four portraits of the king, and Philip appointed him to the high court office of aposentador mayor in 1652.
Velázquez began in a precise tenebrist style influenced by Caravaggio, painting on dark reddish grounds. During his first trip to Italy, following Bolognese painters such as Guido Reni, he adopted light-gray grounds, which produced greater luminosity. His later manner, called manera abreviada by contemporary Spaniards, was bolder and more freely brushed.
Édouard Manet called Velázquez the painter of painters and built directly on his motifs. The impressionists considered him a pioneer of modern art. In the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso made 44 variations of Las Meninas in 1957, Salvador Dalí created a tribute work in 1958, and Francis Bacon produced multiple expressionist variations of the Portrait of Innocent X in the 1950s.
The Museo del Prado in Madrid holds by far the largest collection of Velázquez's work. Most of his paintings entered the Spanish royal collection during his lifetime. Velázquez is estimated to have produced between 110 and 120 known canvases in total.