So far as can be gathered from existing works, thirty or forty years elapsed after the picture of Caravaggio was painted before the scheme was brought into use for the human figure in interiors. In 1630, or thereabouts, Velasquez produced his Christ at the Column.[a] Here the wall is not actually high, but Christ is shown seated on the floor, and hence there is ample wall space over which the eye may rove. It is possible that the adoption of the plan in this instance was the result of accident, but the very unusual pose of Christ hardly warrants the suggestion. Velasquez painted no more pictures of the kind till a quarter of a century later, when he produced Las Meninas. In this the relief is excellent, but it would have been still better without the picture on the wall, and the open door in the background, though the figure seen on the steps through the doorway lends assistance to the illusion. [a] The Prado, Madrid. Towards the middle of the seventeenth century, some followers of the Neapolitan school used the plan occasionally, but the best existing Italian works of the time where it is seen are from the hand of Evaristo Baschenis, a Bergamese monk. He was an excellent painter of still-life, and produced several pictures, each with a boy or a woman seated in the middle of a room near a plain table on which rests a dish of fruit or a gathering of various articles, while at the back there is a high bare wall. In all of these works a fine relief is exhibited, though they are now considerably marred by darkened shadows. A few years later the plan was adopted by some Dutch artists, and later still in France and Germany. Chardin, who in more ways than one seems to have been a French Baschenis, used it in several pictures. In recent times since the study of Velasquez has become a vogue, many artists have successfully followed the plan, and one of the finest examples of it in existence--Lydia Emmet's Patricia[a]--dates as late as 1915. [a] Exhibition of the National (American) Association of Portrait Painters, N. Y., 1915. See Plate 23.