Me and Philip

My friend Brad sent me this e-mail today, which I found highly entertaining, so I thought I would share:

If you went to the state fair and got a caricature drawn of you, and the artist working the booth was Diego Velazquez, I think the resulting portrait might look something like any of his portraits of King Philip IV.

Remember, I did say caricature. I do mean that he kind of looks to me like a comic impression of you, not you. He painted this dude a lot. Must’ve been a bigshot in Velazquez’s day. There are a lot of him when he was older that don’t look as much like you. Also, this is just a portrait. The “action” paintings are always of him hunting or riding a horse or owning a valuable dog — all things that I don’t really associate with you. But every time I see a Velazquez painting of Philip IV, I always think — there goes Diego painting Johnny again.

Hopefully this does not offend you. If you have to have an artist obsessed with your likeness, you can do a lot worse than Diego Velazquez...