Sargent, Velazquez reunited at the Prado

In a first, the Prado is displaying John Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit from beside the painting which inspired it - Diego Velazquez's Las Meninas.

Singer's painting, one of the top draws at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, has been loaned abroad only twice before, to museums in Britain and Japan.

It will be on display in the Spanish capital until May 30 as part of the Prado's The Invited Work series which it launched last year, the museum's directors said.

Sargent travelled to the Prado in 1879 where he studied numerous works by Velazquez, including his 1656 work Las Meninas depicting the Infanta Margarita and her courtiers in the court of King Felipe IV.

For his 1882 The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, Sargent depicted the daughters of his friend and fellow artist at the front of a large, dark foyer of their Paris apartment, evoking the cavernous palace room of Las Meninas.

Four years after Boit's death in 1915, his daughters gave the painting to the Museum of Fine Arts.

Last week the Prado opened a major exhibition called The Art of Power which compares the portraits of Spanish monarchs by Velazquez and Titien.

In June it will present a retrospective of British painter J.M.W. Turner, which is currently on display at the Grand Palais in Paris.