Jack Levine

These representations of people of short stature are significant for their variation. Levine’s fictive example of a little person with a bored expression makes comedy of the woman whose train he holds. In contrast, Goya’s print presents a stately little person, an enormous book opened on his lap. This print is based on Velázquez’s ca. 1645 painting of El Primo, or Don Diego de Acedo. El Primo was a jester in the court of Philip IV of Spain, as people with dwarfism were then considered entertaining merely on the grounds of their embodiment. Lavinia Warren is the woman in both images in the case below. Born to an affluent family, she worked as an educator before electing to professionally perform her difference for profit. By contrasting El Primo with Warren, we can consider the range of agency these people might have had.