ABSTRACT
The generation of painters born in the 1630s produced a considerable number of artists of distinction who would work at the court during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. Many of them were students of the most important figures of the previous generation, Juan Carreno and Francisco Rizi, and continued developing their Late Baroque style and looking toward the Venetian and Flemish schools for inspiration. Mateo Cerezo was born in Burgos in 1637 to a painter of the same name, from whom he must have received his earliest instruction. The teachings that determined Cerezo's style, however, were received in Carreno's workshop in Madrid. His most youthful works are not known, but those of the 1660s, painted in the six years before his early death at the age of twenty-nine, show by their luminosity, lively coloration, and loose facture not only his master's influence but also that of Carreno's principal sources, Van Dyck and Venetian painting.
