Picasso and Hamilton are not alone in regarding Las Meniñas [by Velázquez] as one of the most important works in Western art: Picasso had displayed his admiration for the painting by making forty-five pastiches between August and December 1957. In his carefully wrought etching Hamilton is perhaps more reverential: 'The stage of Velázquez' "meninas" could carry a lot of action, and the mysterious ambiguities (it seems to contain an infinity of cross reflections within the space the picture confronts), allowed some narrative interplay with substitutions of personalities as well as styles...Hamilton adopts a different period of Picasso's work for each of the characters in Velázquez' masterpiece in such a way that the many styles of Picasso are (as his title suggests) hand maidens to the artist rather than the Infanta. Hamilton developed the pictorial idea in three studies made in 1973, which he then used to create the plate in Paris. Six different stage proofs document the progress of his work in the Atelier Crommelynck. Etienne Lullin Richard Hamilton, Prints and Multiples 1939-2002, p. 124