Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Getty Research Institute https://archive.org/details/artofvelasquez00stev_0 THE ART OF VELASQUEZ. 505 Copies only of this Edition have been Printed, of which this is No. London : York St., Covent Garden and New York: 66, Fifth Avenue Cambridge : Deighton, Bell & Co. THE ART VELASQUEZ R. A. M. STEVENSON LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1895 CHISWICK PRESS:-CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON CONTENTS INTRODUCTION. PAGE The Importance of Velasquez in the History of Painting i PART I. Chapter I. His Surroundings in Spain ; his Position at the Court of Philip IV. ..... 5 II. Periods of his Life and Work .... i? III. Comparison of the Three Stages of his Art . 29 PART II. IV. The Dignity of Technique .... 37 V. The Composition of Velasquez .... 59 VI. His Colour ........ 69 VII. His Modelling and Brushwork 81 PART III. VIII. Notes on some of his Pictures .... 91 IX. His Influence upon recent Art 101 X. The Lesson of Impressionism .... 11 1 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PHOTOGRAVURES. PAGE Venus. Latest Period. Reproduced from the original painting by kind permission of Mrs. Morritt, of Rokeby Park . . Frontispiece Don Carlos, Brother of Philip IV. {Prado.) First Period . . 66 The Topers. {Prado.) First Period. Date 1629 ..... 24 Philip IV. Young. {Prado.) First Period.70 Fountain of the Tritons. {Prado.) Second Period ? . . . .56 Philip IV. on Horseback. {Prado.) Middle Period .... 42 Don Ferdinand, Brother of Philip IV. {Prado) Middle Period . 12 Don Balthasar Carlos, Son of Philip IV. {Prado) Middle Period 100 The Surrender of Breda. {Prado) Middle Period .... 8 El Conde—Duque de Olivarez. {Prado.) Middle Period ... 5 The Forge of Vulcan. {Prado.) Circa 1630.48 Las Meninas. Reproduced from the original study in oils by kind per¬ mission of Ralph Bankes, Esq., of Kingston Lacy .... 22 The Coronation of the Virgin. {Prado) Latest Period ... 68 Philip IV. Praying. {Prado) Latest Period ? . . . . .110 Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. Latest Period . 14 Maria Teresa. {Prado.) Latest Period.86 Moenippus. {Prado.) Latest Period ....... 82 Head from “ iEsop.” {Prado.) Latest Period.88 La Hilanderas, or The Spinners. {Prado.) Latest Period . . 84 Philip IV. Old. {Prado.) Latest Period ...... 76 b Vll [Continued overleaf. APPENDIX OF ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS. I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. HALF-TONE BLOCKS. The Adoration of the Magi. (Prado.) Early Style, 1619. The Shepherds. ( National Gallery .) Early Style. Philip IV. Young. (Prado) Early Style. Circa 1623-4. Daughter of Velasquez (so-called). (Prado.) 1626. Philip IV. (Prado.) Early Style. DoSa Maria, Daughter of Philip III. (Prado.) Circa 1630. View in the Garden of the Villa Medici, Rome. (Prado.) Circa 1630. View in the Garden of the Villa Medici, Rome. (Prado.) Circa 1630. Philip IV. as a Sportsman. (Prado). Middle Period. The Admiral Adrian Pulido Pareja. (National Gallery.) Middle Period, 1639. The Crucifixion. (Prado.) Middle Period, 1639. Christ at the Pillar. (National Gallery.) Middle Period. Isabel de Borbon, First Wife of Philip IV. (Prado.) Middle Period. The dress is not by Velasquez. Le Reconte or Conversation. (Louvre.) Middle Period ? Philip III. (Prado.) Partly repainted by Velasquez in Middle Period upon an earlier work by B. Gonzalez. Margarita of Austria, Wife of Philip HI. (Prado) Only the horse and background by Velasquez in Middle Period. The Dwarf “El Primo.” (Prado.) Middle Period, 1644. Equestrian Portrait of Don Balthazar Carlos. (Prado.) Middle Period. Orlando. (National Gallery) Doubtful. Middle Period ? viii XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII. XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII. XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI. XXXII. XXXIII. XXXIV. XXXV. XXXVI. XXXVII. XXXVIII. XXXIX. XL. XLI. XLII. XLIII. Don Pedro de Altamira. (Louvre.) Middle Period, 1633. Count de Benavente. (Prado.) Middle Period. The Sculptor Martinez Montages, once called Alonso Cano. (Prado.) Middle Period. Pablillos de Valladolid, called a Buffoon, an Actor, and a Rhetor. ( Prado .) Middle Period. Philip IV., called the Fraga Portrait. (Dulwich Gallery.) Middle Period, 1644. Dona Juan Pacheco. (Prado.) 1686. Portrait—Unknown Man. (Prado.) Middle Period. A Betrothal. (National Gallery.) Late Middle Style. Mercury and Argos. (Prado.) Late Style ? Middle Period ? A Buffoon called “ Don Juan de Austria.” (Prado.) Late Style. Pope Innocent X. Circa 1650. The God Mars. (Prado.) Late Style. The Dwarf, “El Bobo de Coria,” an Idiot. (Prado.) Middle Period ? (Catalogue.) Late Style (Justi). The Dwarf Sebastian de Morra. (Prado.) Cristobal de Pernia, called “ Babarroja.” (Prado.) Late Style. Mariana de Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. (Prado.) Late Style. Mariana de Austria at Prayers. (Prado.) Late Style. Moenippus. (Prado.) Late Style. tEsopus. (Prado.) Late Style. Las Meninas, also called “ La Familia.” (Prado.) Late Style, 1656. The Dwarf called Antonio el Inglese. (Prado.) Late Style. Philip IV. Old. (National Gallery.) Late Style. St. Anthony visiting St. Paul. (Prado.) Late Style. La Infanta Dona Margarita Maria. (Louvre.) Late Style. Circa 1659. IX THE ART OF VELASQUEZ INTRODUCTION W HEN one speaks of Velasquez, it must be remembered that his influence upon art is still young. His genius slumbered for two hundred years, till the sympathy of one or two great artists broke the spell and showed us the true enchanter of realism, shaping himself from a cloud of misappre¬ hension. The importance and the comparative novelty of the subject may excuse these few notes, taken during a visit to Madrid. For it will be allowed that Italy still draws the mass of pidtu re-lovers. Hundreds of writers, sitting at home, diredt the pilgrimages of thousands of travellers amidst the nicest details of Italian galleries. Every day sees some new book or paper on the Raphaelites, pre-Raphaelites, or Venetians. You enter the Ufiizi of Florence or the Academy of Venice with a crowd who look at their books no less than at the pictures. The Prado of Madrid is almost your own; a few students are there, and a stray traveller or two like yourself, but you may wander half a morning and see I B no other Englishman. The great gallery has not yet been described and criticised in English more than it deserves. Now people like to attach a ready-made sentiment to a pidlure; they hate to form their own judgment, and to wait till a canvas speaks to them in its own language. The true effedt of art is slow. A pidlure is a quiet companion of your leisure, whose mood you learn to accept without heated contro¬ versy; one of those quiet figures, in fadt, who sit and smoke opposite you, till you seem 2, ‘to exchange thoughts with them by something like mental trans¬ ference. If you must rush this intimacy in a public gallery, you should look at a pidlure as you would at a mesmeriser, with your head empty and all your life in your eyes. But the hurried visitor sins from over-eagerness. He is fluttered by anticipation of the many things to come, and will not abandon him¬ self to what is actually before his eyes. He will not wait; he prefers to bustle up his acquaintance with a canvas by means of the formal introduction of some one whom he regards as an habitue of picture-galleries. The energy and eloquence of a Ruskin and the sympathetic comprehension of a Whistler or a Carolus- Duran are needed for Madrid. I do not pretend to have settled my own opinions about Velasquez, much less to set myself up as a guide, or to utter a final word upon such a subject. Some one with time and opportunity, I hope, may take my notes into account, in a thorough investigation of Velasquez, from the point of view of modern art. As yet few but painters enjoy Velasquez, or rightly estimate his true position in the history of art. Not much is known about him. Contempt, not to say oblivion, fell on the man who pre¬ conceived the spirit of our own day. Amongst notable prophets of the new and true—-Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude—he was the newest, and certainly the truest, from our point of view; so new and so true, indeed, that two hundred years after he had shown the mystery of light as God made it, we still hear that Velasquez was a sordid soul who never saw beauty, a mere master of technique, wholly lacking in imagination. So say those whose necks are stiff with looking at Italy and Raphael. Delacroix 1 complains of them, in his Letters, that they see beauty only in lines, and therefore refuse to believe that others may receive a different kind of impression. The opinion of these people is not to be controverted by words alone, and, as nature is a hard teacher, a student may save himself trouble by studying Velasquez at Madrid. A man of genius learns from a mere hint, it is true, and such an one without going further than Paris or London may understand how Velasquez saw the world: a more ordinary eye, how¬ ever, must take the Spaniard’s greatness half on trust, if he has not seen Madrid. But with the best will in the world some eyes really cannot see the side of nature that Velasquez saw; while others are so bandaged by Italian prejudice that they may save themselves the trouble of a journey. 1 “ Ce fameux beau que les uns voient dans la ligne serpentine, les autres dans la ligne droite, ils se sont tous obstine a ne le voir que dans les lignes. Je suis a ma fenetre et je vois le plus beau paysage: l’idee d’une ligne ne me vient pas a 1’esprit.” 3 CHAPTER I. T RAVELLING in Spain, after all, is not so bad as many would have it. Neither are the trains so slow and so dangerous, nor the food and wine so unpalatable, as they have been reported, while the approach to Madrid must take you through the scenery of Velasquez’s pictures. This provides a fitting overture to the long array of his works which awaits you in the Prado. But in itself no country offers a more beautiful landscape than Spain, and none that I have seen provides a more desirable setting for figures, horses, and other picturesque obje&s. No trivialities encumber the large structural features of this country. As in the fens, so here, a figure dominates. You see it on the dry, stony foregrounds of the empty, rolling plains, which are ringed round with sharp, shapely sierras in die broad, blue distance. The landscape is unembarrassed with detail, but the one or two interest¬ ing forms with which it is furnished are at once simple and piquant. A clear, delicate atmosphere, penetrated with a flood of light, softens every definition, and fuses every local tint without blotting it, as in our own foggy island. No local hue appears as if gummed 5 like a wafer against the universal grey paper of every¬ thing that is not quite close at hand; nor do the masses of obje&s look like thin, unmodelled side- scenes against an obliterated distance. Things of the liveliest tint sink into the coloured whole, owning, by their lit side as by their shadowed, the federating power of real light. Great parts of Spain resemble piCtorially the plains and hills of the Maremma more than any other part of Italy. But the view, although as luminous and as coloured as in Italy, is usually less crowded and less excited, except for the active sport of clouds in this stormier region of Spain. Indeed, the country of Velasquez seems the very place in which to study values, in which to discover and to develop im¬ pressionism. On the way to Toledo I saw the sierras, just as Velasquez often painted them, of a powerful blue streaked with stretches of snow, and looking out from an agitated sky full of rifted clouds of a dirty white colour. For Spain is by no means always bright and gay, though always atmospheric and profound. In this country external nature favoured the painter both by landscape and by picturesque figure; but the inner condition of the people scarcely answered the demands of the historian, who makes art flourish only with freedom and public enterprise. Where was the growing commerce, the expanding institutions, or the religious liberty in the shrinking, priest-ridden Spain of the seventeenth century ? As Mr. Whistler says, the growth of art is sporadic, and to affeCt the mind of one man it is not necessary to postulate the conflict of nations and all the mighty epoch-making machinery of history. Genius is concoCted by the momentary 6 accidental commerce of a man and woman, and fostered by a voyage, a visit, or communion with a half-dozen of friends. Commercial demand may encourage trade painting, and princely patronage palatial decoration; but who shall say what encourages genius-—that com¬ pound of original seeing, intellectual courage, and some gift or other of expression ? Is it encouraging to be a portrait painter, to undergo the interested but ignorant criticism of the sitter, to dis¬ regard times and seasons, the disposition of the moment and the beckonings of the spirit, and to jump at no obstacle that you cannot clear in your habitual stride ? Is it encouraging to live in a sinking country, and be the painter of a bigoted and fantastically ceremonious court? Yet, in spite of such poor encouragement, Velasquez became the boldest and most independent of painters. But is there no qualifying circumstance ? May not the picture of this life be a transparency that changes when you hold it up to the light? Many old men, reared in the puritanical and hypocritical Edinburgh of the past, could tell you the private, reactionary efiFeCt of that life of repression and humbug upon a decent, genuine man. That you may not think at all, or aCt for yourself, is to add the very zest of piracy to experiment in life and origi¬ nality in thought. Where public profession is mani¬ festly a lie, and public manners a formal exaggeration, life becomes a chest with a false bottom, which opens into a refuge for the kindlier, wiser, and more ardent among human beings. As much as Spain, the court, and the priest, asked of man in those days, so much you may be sure did the courageous individual 7 repay himself in the freedom of private life, and in the audacity of private thought. It is, perhaps, this instinCt of reaction that causes the word license to companion the word discipline in any historical account of an army. Nothing, they say, was more intimate and freer than the private bearing of those nobles of the ancien regime , who, nevertheless, stood at arms, so to speak, beneath the eye of the king on any public occasion. Delaunay, I remember, brought out this distinction of manners, when he played the part of Richelieu in Alexandre Dumas’s “ Mademoiselle de Belle Isle.” To be a king of Spain, to preside at religious execu¬ tions, to have a wife whom no man, even to save her life, might touch on pain of death, was to be a creature sorely in need of private liberty, and the solace of confidential intercourse. Philip IV. seems to have been naturally kind, genial, and affable, and to have divided his leisure between the hunting- field and Velasquez’ studio. The two, artist and king, grew old together, with like interests in horses, dogs, and painting; thawing when alone into that easy familiarity between master and old servant, freezing instantly in public into the stiff positions that their parts in life required. Painter to the King when he was scarce twenty-five years old, Velasquez escaped most of the dangers and humiliations of professional portrait-painting, without losing its useful discipline of the eye, its rigorous test of the ever-present and exading model. Though remote from Italy, from its living jealousies, and its overwhelming past, Velasquez was able to 8 copy Italian pictures in the palaces of Spain, while he was permitted by the king’s bounty to visit Rome and Venice as a person of some consequence. The situation favoured the growth of a genuinely personal way of looking at the world; and, indeed, no one was more original in his art than Velasquez, and no one less afraid of dispensing with traditional receipts for truth and beauty. He sought more and more to express the essential quality of his own eyesight, and he grew less and less dependent on hints derived from other people’s practice. What he painted therefore concerned him less than how he painted. Like Rembrandt, who never ceased to paint his own portrait, Velasquez studied one model, from youth to age, with unalterable patience and an ever-fresh inspiration. He could look at the king’s well-known head with a renewed interest, as he went deeper into the mystery of eyesight, and became better informed as to the effects of real light. His slow transformation of this face, through a hard realism of feature and detail, to the suavity of impressional beauty, seems comparable to that tireless climb of the Greek sculp¬ tors, through so many stiffly studied athletes, to the breadth of Phidias’s gods, or the suppleness of the serene Hermes of Praxiteles. Unrelaxing criticism of beauty distinguishes the highest order of artist alone ; it comes from that thirst after perfection which kept the Greeks satisfied, artistic, even enthusiastic, whilst polishing for three hundred years the details and proportions of what we should call the same stale old style of architecture. Curious about particular subjects, but incapable of conceiving a general ideal of sight itself, meaner artists sicken at the apparently ordinary, or the apparently stale; and must be cockered up with the pride of lofty titles, and the conceit of novelty of motif, which they mistake for originality of view. On the other hand, those who constantly compare their work, not so much with decorative traditions, as with the beauty they see in reality, keep their senses adfive, and scent, even in the apparently commonplace subjedt, opportunity for the improvement which makes for perfedtion. The details of Velasquez’s life, the dates, adventures, and disputed attributions of his pidhires, can all be studied in the translation of Carl Justi’s book. It is perhaps more amusing to take a turn round the Prado before you have read about Velasquez, before you have heard what pidture is doubtful, and when each canvas was painted. One is apt to see too readily in a canvas what one has previously learnt in a book. If one has guessed the dates of pidtures, and roughly grouped them into periods, upon no other evidence than the style of the work or the testimony of the subjedt, one really understands the growth of the painter’s powers, and needs the historical document merely to corredt trifling errors and to elucidate doubtful points. For this reason I passed two or three days in the galleries at Madrid without any book-knowledge of Velasquez, and without any catalogue. For those who have not much time the plan has its drawbacks. Knowing nothing of the painter’s life, they may well overlook matters that have given rise to serious question. It will be well, there¬ fore, to mention one or two significant dates and events in the painter’s life, upon the authority of Carl Justi. Velasquez was born in 1599, and died in 1660, and his career may be conveniently divided by his two visits to Italy in 1629 and 1649. His connection with Philip IV. began when the king was eighteen and the painter twenty-four. Velasquez painted his first por¬ trait of Philip in 1623, and became the colleague of the king’s Italian painters, Eugenio Caxesi, Gonzalez, and Carducho. In 1628, Rubens,—then fifty-one years old, and the most renowned artist of the day,—visited Madrid on a semi-political mission, and of course Velasquez aCted as his friend and guide to Spain. It was direCtly after his nine months’ friendship with Rubens, and perhaps owing to the influence of the Flemish painter with the king, that Velasquez was permitted to undertake the Italian voyage in the train of Spinola, the conqueror of Breda. During a stay of eighteen months, he set himself to copy pictures, to paint landscape and figures on his own account, and to make acquaintance with Italian painters, not excepting his countryman Ribera. Upon his return to Spain he not only worked as usual at portraiture, but he also took a leading part in the decoration of the new palace Buen Retiro. During this middle period of his life, when he became the first painter of Spain, he counted among his immediate disciples his own son-in-law, J. B. del Mazo, and the more famous Murillo. The second journey to Rome, undertaken in 1649, separates this long period from that third and last division of his life, in which his finest and most characteristic work was painted. In his latest pictures Velasquez seems to owe as little as any man may to the example of earlier painters. But, indeed, from the beginning he was a realist, and one whose ideal of art was to use his own eyes. His early pictures cannot be surely attached to any school; they are of doubtful parentage, though, with some truth, one might affiliate them to Caravaggio and the Italian naturalists. From the first, he shows sensitiveness to form, and a taste for solid and dired painting. He quickly learnt to model with surprising justness, but for a long time he continued to treat a head in a group as he would if he saw it alone. Only slowly he learnt to take the impression of a whole scene as the true motif of a picture. In his early work he faithfully observed the relations between bits of his subject, but not always the relation of each bit to the whole. If we compare the realistic work of the young Velasquez with the pictures of the great Venetians, we shall find it lacking their comfortable unity of asped. That asped may have been more remote in its relation to nature, but it was certainly ampler and more decoratively beautiful. Up to the age of thirty, indeed, Velasquez seemed content to mature quietly his powers of execution, without seeking to alter his style, or to improve the quality of his realism. Had he died during his first visit to Rome, it might have been supposed, without absurdity, that he had said his last word, and that, young as he was, he had lived to see his art fully ripened. It would be difficult, indeed, to do anything finer, with piecemeal realism for an ideal, than the later works of this first period. Pidures of the pre-Italian epoch are cc The Water Carrier,” “ The Adoration of the Magi ” (Prado, 1054), “The Shepherds” (National Gallery), “Bust of Philip in Armour” (Prado, 1071), full-length, 12 “Philip in Black” (Prado, 1070), “Philip” (young, National Gallery), and “The Topers” (Prado, 1058). “ The Forge of Vulcan ” (Prado, 1059) was painted at Rome on the visit which initiated the second manner. The conversation and example of Rubens, the study of Italian galleries, as well as the pradiice of palatial decoration at Buen Retiro, gave a decorative character to the art of Velasquez in the second period. One tastes a flavour of Venetian art in the subjedt pi&ures, and one remarks something bold, summary, and less intimate than usual, about the portraiture of this time. As examples we may take “ The Surrender of Breda” (Prado, 1060), “The Boar Hunt” (National Gallery), “The Crucifixion” (Prado, 1055), “Christ at the Pillar” (National Gallery), “ Prince Ferdinand,” with dog, gun, and landscape background (Prado, 1 °75), “The King as a Sportsman” (Prado, 1074), “Don Balthasar and Dogs” (Prado, 1076), the large equestrian “Philip IV.” (Prado, 1066), the equestrian “Don Balthasar” (Prado, 1068), the equestrian “Olivares” (Prado, 1069), “ The Sculptor Montanez” (Prado, 1091), “The Admiral Pulido” (National Gallery), various landscapes, and a few studies such as “The Riding School” and its variations. During these twenty years, if ever, Velasquez relaxed his effort at naturalism,—not that he slackened his grip upon form, but that he seems to have accepted in Italy the necessity for professional pkflure-making. His colours became a shade more positive or less bathed in light, and his unity to some extent an adopted decorative convention. Upon his return from the second voyage, as if he *3 had satisfied himself that Venetian art could not wholly render his mariner of seeing, and that, at any rate, he had pushed it, in “ The Surrender of Breda,” as far as it could go, he comes about once more and seeks for dignity and unity in the report of his own eyes. In fad:, he adds the charm that we call impressionism to such work of the third period as “Innocent the Tenth,” done in Rome, “Queen Mariana” (Prado, 1078), “Las Meninas ” (Prado, 1062), “Las Hilanderas ” (Prado, 1061), “ Pablillos de Valladolid” (Prado, 1092), “iEsop” (Prado, 1100), “Moenippus” (Prado, 1101), the so-called “Maria Teresa” (Prado, 1084), “Philip IV.” (Prado, 1080), “Philip IV.” (old, National Gallery), and some of the Dwarfs and Imbe¬ ciles in the Prado. Some sojourn in the deadly capital of Spain is necessary if one would sound the variety of Velasquez, and learn how often he forestalled the discoveries of recent schools of painting. Various stages of his growth, as shown in the Prado, remind us of various stages in the progress of modern naturalism. Sudden gusts of his fancy for some type or some quality in nature ally this or that canvas by Velasquez with the work of a man or a movement in our century. The names of Regnault, Manet, Carolus-Duran, Henner, Whistler, and Sargent, rise to one’s lips at every turn in the Prado; one thinks, but less inevitably, of Corot, when one sees the landscape of Velasquez. His early work recalls John Philip and Wilkie, while the girl in “Las Hilanderas” should be the very ideal of art to the Pinwell, Walker and Macbeth school. Except the “Venus” belonging to Mr. R. Morritt of Rokeby Hall, the Prado lacks no pi&ure essential to the full under¬ standing of the painter’s art. No other collection can give a just idea of the great works in Madrid. To see only the National Gallery, the Louvre, and the various private collections in England, leaves one without an adequate idea of the equestrian portraits, cc Philip IV. ” (1066), “Olivares” (1069), and “Don Balthasar” (1068); “The Surrender of Breda” (1060), “The Sculptor Martinez Montanez” (1091), “ Moenippus ” (1101), “ JEsop” (1100), “The Maria Teresa” (1084), “Las Meninas ” (1062), “Las Hilanderas ” (1061), and the series of Dwarfs and Imbeciles. These pictures have changed very little; but as with all old pigment, a good light is necessary to show the subtlety of the values and the expressive character of the subdued or suggested detail. Fortunately the light is excellent in the two chief galleries of the Prado, which contain the principal pictures. The first, a long room, wider than the long gallery of the Louvre, is covered with a barrel-ceiling. About half-way down on the left, a door opens into the other room, a large, well-lit octagon. Several large side-lit rooms with dark corners, try the eyes, and baffle efforts at compari¬ son; fortunately, however, they contain for the most part inferior pictures, the works of predecessors of Velasquez, and a few early canvases by the Master himself. *5 CHAPTER II. T RUSTING to report and to the evidence of reproductions, I expected to find “ The Sur¬ render of Breda” (1060) the finest Velasquez in the Prado. So I might have thought, if the painter’s natural gift had been less explicitly set forth, if he had never lived to paint u Las Meninas,” u The Spinners,” “iEsop,”