Passionate about painting, King Philip IV was the largest art collector of his time, and the greatest servant of this passion was Velazquez. Although he left a legacy of little more than one hundred canvasses, Velazquez exerted an enormous influence on other painters through the twentieth century, including such great masters as Manet, Picasso, and Francis Bacon. In 1990, filmmaker Didier Baussy-Oulianoff was given special access to film 79 Velazquez paintings at the Prado in Madrid, Spain, creating a portrait of the artist to reveal his character from his early artistic youth to the works for the royal family and its entourage destined for the walls of the Spanish palace.
