The Great Masters 
 
 in Painting and Sculpture 
 Edited by G. C. Williamson 
 
 VELASQUEZ 
 
THE GREAT MASTERS IN PAINTING AND 
 SCULPTURE. 
 
 The following Volumes have been issued, price ^s. net each. 
 
 BERNARDINO LUINI. By George C. Williamson, Litt.D., Editor 
 of the Series. 
 
 VELASQUEZ. By R. A. M. Stevenson. 
 
 ANDREA DEL SARTO. By H. Guinness. 
 
 LUCA SIGNORELLL By Maud Cruttwell. 
 
 RAPHAEL. By H. Strachey. 
 
 CARLO CRIVELLL By G. McNeil Rushforth, M.A., Classical 
 Lecturer, Oriel College, Oxford. 
 
 CORREGGIO. By Selwyn Brinton, M. A., Author of "The Renais- 
 sance in Italian Art." 
 
 DONATELLO. By Hope Rea, Author of " Tuscan Artists." 
 
 PERUGINO. By G. C. Williamson, Litt.D. 
 
 In preparation. 
 
 SODOMA. By the Contessa Lorenzo Priuli-Bon. 
 
 MEMLINC. By W. H. James Weale, late Keeper of the National Art 
 
 Library. 
 DELLA ROBBIA. By the Marchesa Burlamacchi. 
 EL GRECO. By Manuel B. Cossio, Litt.D., Ph.D., Director of the 
 
 Musee P^dagogique, Madrid. 
 GIORGIONE. By Herbert Cook, M.A. 
 MICHAEL ANGELO. By Charles Holroyd, Keeper of the 
 
 National Gallery of British Art. 
 THE BROTHERS BELLINI. By S. Arthur Strong, M. A., Librarian 
 
 to the House of Lords. 
 REMBRANDT. By Malcolm Bell. 
 
 Others to follow. 
 
 LONDON: GEORGE BELL & SONS 
 
VELASaUEZ 
 
 BY 
 
 R. A. M. STEVENSON 
 
 LONDON 
 GEORGE BELL & SONS 
 
 1900 
 
 J. CCebrfan, 
 lb<n.Octa^!aSt., 
 
 9AM fUMttOmOO. o OAt. 
 

 First published in this form, October 1899, 
 Reprinted, with corrections, July 190a 
 
l/f 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 The critical part of the matter in this volume has 
 appeared before, in a more expensive form, under the 
 title " The Art of Velasquez." The biographical infor- 
 mation, however, which was limited then to a single 
 paragraph, has been amplified, and now forms a separ- 
 ate chapter. The Author has taken advantage of the 
 opportunity to make a few verbal corrections, the time 
 at his disposal not having allowed him to re-visit 
 Madrid, as he had hoped to do. 
 
 A list of the works of Velasquez, and a Bibliography, 
 have been added by the Editor of the Series. It is not 
 claimed that the list is in any sense complete ; nor has 
 Dr Williamson attempted to be critical in his attribu- 
 tions. He has simply recorded all the pictures attri- 
 buted to Velasquez with which he is acquainted, adding 
 such notes as are contained in catalogues or in his own 
 note-books, and accepting the information supplied by 
 the owners of the pictures. To the pages of the book 
 he would refer the student for any scientific criticism or 
 for authoritative statements as to the authenticity oi 
 disputed pictures. 
 
 249885 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Bibliography . . 
 
 Introduction The Importance of Velasquez in 
 THE History of Painting . 
 
 Chapter I. His Surroundings in Spain : his Posi 
 TiON AT the Court of Philip IV. 
 
 II. Periods of his Life and Work . 
 
 III. Comparison between the Three Stages 
 OF HIS Art .... 
 
 IV. The Dignity of Technique 
 V. The Composition of Velasquez . 
 
 VI. His Colour 
 
 VII. His Modelling and Brushwork 
 
 VIII. Notes on some of his Pictures . 
 
 IX. His Relation to Older Art 
 
 X. His Influence upon Recent Art 
 
 XI. The Lesson of Impressionism , 
 " Appendix List of Works . . 
 
 xiii 
 
 4 
 
 lO 
 
 23 
 34 
 42 
 63 
 73 
 84 
 
 94 
 103 
 
 "3 
 129 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Equestrian Portrait of Don Balthazar Carlos. 
 
 {Prado.) Middle Period. {Photogravure) Frontispiece 
 El Infante Don Carlos. {Prado.) Early Style . 4 
 Philip IV. Young. {Prado.) Early Style. Circa 
 
 1623-4 8 
 
 Dona Juana Pacheco. {Prado.) . . . .12 
 Dona Maria, Daughter of Philip III. {Prado,) 
 
 Circa 1630 ........ 14 
 
 Daughter of Velasquez (so-called). {Prado.) 1626 16 
 The Adoration of the Magi. {Prado.) Early Style, 
 
 1619 ......... 20 
 
 --^'he Surrender of Breda. {Prado.) Middle Period '^ 
 The Topers. {Prado.) First Period. Date 1629 . 28 
 --'Las Meninas, also called *^La Familia." {Prado.) 
 
 Late Style, 1656 32 
 
 Philip IV. as a Sportsman. {Prado.) Middle Period 36 
 The Admiral Adrian Pulido Pareja. {National 
 
 Gallery.) Middle Period, 1639 . . . . 40 
 Le Reconte or Conversation. {Louvre.) Middle 
 
 Period (?) 44 
 
 Philip IV. on Horseback. {Prado.) Middle Period 46 
 El Conde-Duque d'Olivarez. {Prado.) Middle 
 
 Period 48 
 
 ix 
 
X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Dwarf "El Primo." (Prado) Middle Period, 
 
 1644 . . 50j 
 
 The Sculptor Martinez Montanes, once called J 
 
 Alonso Cano. {Prado) Middle Period . . $; 
 
 A Betrothal. {National Gallery) Late Middle Style 5I 
 Christ at the Pillar. {National Gallery) Middle 
 
 Period 6( 
 
 View in the Garden of the Villa Medici, Rome. 
 
 {Prado) Circa 1630 ...... 6 
 
 View in the Garden of Aranjuez. {Prado) Circa 
 
 1630 .... .... 64 
 
 Mercury and Argus. {Prado) Late Style (?). Middle 
 
 Period (?) . 61 
 
 MoENiPPUS. {Prado) Late Style . . . . 7< 
 
 The Coronation of the Virgin. {Prado) Late 
 
 Period . .7 
 
 ^ The Forge of Vulcan. {Prado) Circa 1630 . . 7, 
 
 Pablillos de Valladolid, called a Buffoon, an 
 
 Actor, and a Rhetor. {Prado) Middle Period 7 1 
 
 The Crucifixion. {Prado) Middle Period, 1639 
 
 Pope Innocent X. {Hermitage) Circa 1650 . . 8 
 
 ^sopus. {Prado) Late Style 8( 
 
 Maria Teresa. {Prado) Late Period . . . 9( 
 
 ^ Las Hilanderas, or The Spinners. {Prado) Late 
 
 Period 91 
 
 The Dwarf, " El Nino de Vallecas," an Idiot. 
 {Prado) Middle Period (?) (Catalogue). Late Style 
 
 (Justi) 9, 
 
 The Dwarf Sebastian de Morra. {Prado) . . 9^ 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Cristobal de Pernia, called " Babarroja." (Prado.) 
 
 Late Style loo 
 
 Mariana de Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. 
 
 {Frado.) Late Style 102 
 
 The Dwarf called Antonio el Inglese. {Frado.) 
 
 Late Style 106 
 
 Philip IV. Old. {National Gallery.) Late Style . no 
 The God Mars. {Frado.) Late Style . . .114 
 St Anthony visiting St Paul. {Frado.) Late Style 116 
 La Infanta Dona Margarita Maria. {Louvre.) Late 
 
 Style. Circa 1659 118 
 
 Venus. Latest Period. Reproduced from the original 
 painting by kind permission of Mrs Morritt, of 
 Rokeby Park 122 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 w- 
 
 ^Amador de los Rios, Don Jos6. "Sevilla Pintosesca." 
 Seville, 1844. 
 
 ^Aranjo y Sanchez, Don Ceferino. "Los Museos de 
 B| Espafia." Madrid, 1875. 
 
 Armstrong, Sir Walter. "Art and Life of Velasquez." 
 1896. 
 
 AsENSio Y Toledo, Don Jos6 Maria. " Francisco Pacheco ; 
 sus obras Artisticas." Seville, 1867. 
 
 Beruete, A. DE. "Velasquez." Paris, 1898. 
 
 Blanc, Charles. "Histoire des Peintres." Paris. 
 
 Bosarte. "Viage Artistico k varios Pueblos de Espana." 
 Madrid, 1804. 
 
 Burger, W. "Tresor d* Art en Angleterre." Paris, 1865. 
 
 Burger, W. "Velasquez et ses CEuvres." Paris, 1865. 
 
 Carducho, Vicente. "Dialogos de la Pintura." Madrid, 
 
 1633- 
 Cean Bermudez, D. Juan Agustin. "Diccionario His- 
 
 torico." Madrid, i8oo. 
 
 Cruzada Villaamil, Don Gregorio. "Revista Europea 
 Informaciones de las calidades de Velasquez." Madrid, 
 1874. 
 
 Cumberland. " Anecdotes of Painters in Spain." London, 
 1782. 
 
 Curtis, C. B. " Catalogue of the Works of Velasquez and 
 Murillo." 1883. 
 
xiv BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Davillier, Ch. " Memoire de Velasquez." Paris, 1874. 
 
 El Arte en Espana. Madrid, 1862. 
 
 Ford, Richard. " Handbook for Spain." 
 
 Ford, Richard. "Paintings of Spain." In Quarterly^ June 
 1848. 
 
 Gautier, T. "Velasquez," "UArtiste." March, 1868. 
 
 Guellette, Charles. " Les Peintres Espagnols." Paris, 
 1863. 
 
 JusTi, Carl. "Diego Velasquez und sein Jahrhundert." 
 Bonn, 1889. 
 
 JusTi, Carl. "Velasquez and his Times." Translated by 
 Keane. 1889. 
 
 Lawson, E. Kerr, "Catalogue of the Museo del Prado," 
 Madrid, 1896. 
 
 Lefort, Paul, in "Gazette des Beaux Arts." 1879-84. 
 
 Lefort, Paul, "Velasquez," in "Artistes C^iebres" series. 
 Paris. 
 
 LucKE, H. "Velasquez." 
 
 Madrazo, Don Pedro de. " Catalogue of Prado." Madrid, 
 
 1872. 
 
 Madrazo, Don Pedro de. *^ Viage Artistico de tres siglos por 
 las Colecciones de los reyes de Espana." Barcelona, 1884. 
 
 Madrazo, Don Pedro de. "Velasquez," " L'Art." Nov- 
 ember and December 1878. 
 
 Pacheco, Francisco. "El Arte de la Pintura." Seville, 
 1649. 
 
 Palomino de Castro y Velasco, Don Antonio. "El 
 Museo Pictorico y Escala Optica." Madrid, 17 15. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY xv 
 
 Passavant. "Die Christliche Kunst in Spanien." Leipsic, 
 
 1853. 
 Quillet. " Dictionnaire des Peintres, Espagnol." Paris, 
 
 1815. 
 
 Ris, Clement de. "Le Mus^e de Madrid." Paris, 1859. 
 Stirling -Maxwell, Sir W. "Velasquez and his Works." 
 
 1855. 
 Stirling-Maxwell, Sir W. "Annals of the Artists of 
 
 Spain." London, 1848. 
 
 Stowe, Edwin. "Velasquez." 1895. 
 
 ViARDOT, L. " Les Musses d' Espagne." Paris, i860. 
 
 Zarco del Valle, Don M. R. "Documentos ineditos para 
 la Historia de las Bellas artes en Espana." Madrid, 1870. 
 
k 
 
 VELASQUEZ 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE OF VELASQUEZ IN THE HISTORY 
 OF PAINTING 
 
 When one speaks of Velasquez, it must be remem- 
 bered 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 misapprehension. The import- 
 ance 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 picture-lovers. Hundreds of writers, sitting at home, 
 direct 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 Uffizi 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 
 no other Englishman. The great gallery has not yet 
 been described and criticised in English more than 
 A 
 
2 VELASQUEZ 
 
 it deserves. Now people like to attach a ready-made 
 sentiment to a picture; they hate to form their own 
 judgment, and to wait till a canvas speaks to them 
 in its own language. The true effect of art is slow. 
 A picture is a quiet companion of your leisure, whose 
 mood you learn to accept without heated controversy ; 
 one of those quiet figures, in fact, who sit and smoke 
 opposite you, till you seem to exchange thoughts with 
 them by something like mental transference. If you 
 must rush this intimacy in a public gallery, you should 
 look at a picture 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 himself 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 
 habitu6 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 
 preconceived the spirit of our own day. Amongst 
 notable prophets of the new and true Rubens,! 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 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 imagina- 
 tion. So say those whose necks are stiff with looking 
 at Italy and Raphael. Delacroix ^ 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 farther than Paris or London 
 may understand how Velasquez saw the world : a 
 more ordinary eye, however, 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. 
 
 ^ **Ce fameux beau que les uns voient dans la ligne serpentine, les 
 autres dans la ligne droite, ils se sont tous obstin^ a ne le voir que dans 
 les lignes. Je suis a ma fenetre et je vols le plus beau paysage : I'id^e 
 d'une ligne ne me vient pas a I'esprit.** 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 HIS SURROUNDINGS IN SPAIN : HIS POSITION AT THE 
 COURT OF PHILIP IV. 
 
 Travelling 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 land- 
 scape than Spain, and none that I have seen provides 
 a more desirable setting for figures, horses, and other 
 picturesque objects. 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 empty, rolling plains, which are ringed 
 round with sharp, shapely sierras in the broad, blue 
 distance. The landscape is unembarrassed with detail, 
 but the one or two interesting 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 with- 
 out blotting it, as in our own foggy island. No local 
 hue appears as if gummed like a wafer against the 
 universal grey paper of everything that is not quite 
 close at hand ; nor do the masses of objects look like 
 
 4 
 
PHILIP IV 
 
HIS SURROUNDINGS IN SPAIN s 
 
 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 impressionism. 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 
 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 
 
6 VELASQUEZ 
 
 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 
 disregard 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 en- 
 couragement, 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 effect 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 originality 
 in thought. Where public profession is manifestly 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 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 licence to companion the word 
 discipline in any historical account of an army. 
 
HIS SURROUNDINGS IN SPAIN 7 
 
 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 con- 
 fidential intercourse. Philip IV. seems to have been 
 naturally kind, genial, and affable, and to have divided 
 his leisure between the hunting-field and Velasquez's 
 studio. The two, artist and king, grew old together, 
 with like interests in horses, dogs, and painting ; thaw- 
 ing 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 exacting model. 
 
 Though remote from Italy, from its living jealousies, 
 and its overwhelming past, Velasquez was able to 
 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 
 
8 VELASQUEZ 
 
 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 Rem- 
 brandt, 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 sculptors, 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 pro- 
 portions of what we should call the same stale old 
 style of architecture. Curious about particular sub- 
 jects, 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 de- 
 corative traditions, as with the beauty they see in 
 reality, keep their senses active, and scent, even in 
 
PHILIP IV (YOUNG) 
 
HIS SURROUNDINGS IN SPAIN 9 
 
 the apparently commonplace subject, opportunity for 
 the improvement which makes for perfection. 
 
 The details of Velasquez's life, the dates, adventures, 
 and disputed attributions of his pictures, 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 picture 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 pictures, and roughly 
 grouped them into periods, upon no other evidence 
 than the style of the work or the testimony of the 
 subject, one really understands the growth of the 
 painter's powers, and needs the historical document 
 merely to correct trifling errors and to elucidate doubt- 
 ful 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 ques- 
 tion. It will be well, therefore, to mention one or two 
 significant dates and events in the painter's life, upon 
 the authority of Carl Justt 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 PERIODS OF HIS LIFE AND WORK 
 
 By 1599, the year Velasquez was born, his native place 
 Seville had reached the height of its fortunes, and was 
 about to decline from its renowned position as *'the 
 capital of all the merchants in the world." The site 
 was built upon by successive civilisations Moorish, 
 Gothic, Renaissance ; so that Seville was truly both an 
 " essentially Oriental city " and a " very Catholic city." 
 At the end of the sixteenth century, its Catholicism, 
 though paramount, allowed it to be called a "city of 
 pleasure," the home of poetry and " Italian culture " 
 a town whose Alcazar was named "The School of 
 Love." The great painter's family was not of Sevillian 
 origin ; his grandfather, Diego Rodriguez de Silva, 
 came to Seville from Oporto, the home of the Silva 
 family. His name, Velasquez, the painter took from 
 his mother, who belonged to an old family of Sevillian 
 hidalgos. Juan de Silva made no attempt to thwart 
 his son's inclination towards painting, but about 161 2 
 he placed the boy with Francisco de Herrera (1576- 
 1656), an architect as well as a painter of religious 
 pictures, low -life and still-life. Dissatisfied with the 
 rough temper of this master, Velasquez left him after 
 about a year, and passed into the studio of Francisco 
 Pacheco (i 571-1654), where he remained for five years. 
 
 10 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORK il 
 
 Pacheco was a careful and severe teacher of drawing 
 as well as a pedant, a scholar, and the author of a 
 work on painting. From his writings we gather much 
 information concerning Velasquez, his friendships with 
 artists, and his connection with great personages. 
 
 Pacheco felt so satisfied with the birth, the industry, 
 the talent of his pupil that he chose him for his son- 
 in-law, and, on April 23, 161 8, married him to his 
 daughter, Juana de Miranda. Thus the good-will, the 
 friends, the interest of Pacheco were placed henceforth 
 at the service of his son-in-law. Among these friends 
 were most of those who took any account of art and 
 letters in Seville. An opportunity to use their kind offices 
 soon occurred. Philip III. died on March 31, 1621; the 
 young king, Philip IV., dismissed his father's minister, 
 the Duke of Lerma, and gave his confidence to the 
 Count Olivarez, a son of the governor of the Alcazar / 
 at Seville. Up to 161 5 Olivarez had lived in Seville r 
 as a patron of poets and painters ; when he became 
 the new king's favourite, some Sevillian men of letters 
 spoke to him of Pacheco's son-in-law. Velasquez went 
 at once to Madrid, but it was not till his second visit 
 in 1623, and only then after some delay, due to the 
 arrival of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Buckingham, 
 that Olivarez managed to get him a sitting for an A 
 equestrian portrait of the king. A bust in armour ( 
 (Prado, 107 1 ) must have been painted at the same S^ 
 time as the now lost equestrian portrait. The likeness 
 pleased, and its author, at twenty -four, received his 
 appointment as Court painter to a king of eighteen. 
 In this position Velasquez found himself associated 
 with the Court painters, Eugenio Caxesi, Carducho, 
 Gonzales, and later on, Nafdi. They were not well 
 
r2 VELASQUEZ 
 
 disposed towards a new-comer who speedily won the 
 favour of their royal patrons and sitters. 
 
 Philip IV. (1605-65) had two brothers Carlos 
 (1607-32), and the Cardinal Ferdinand (1609- ). Of 
 these Carlos was the stoutest, the most lively, and 
 the least funereal in aspect ; Ferdinand, with the long 
 face of a shrewd but human Scottish lawyer, the most 
 capable and the most active in affairs, while in sport 
 he was second only to the king, who deserved his 
 reputation as the best rider in Spain. Year by year 
 the royal brothers enjoyed more and more the days 
 spent in private expeditions to the hunting-grounds 
 about the Escurial, Toledo, and Aranjuez. These were 
 informal parties, attended only by kindred spirits of 
 whatever rank. The woods of El Pardo, much nearer 
 the capital, were chosen for such great state functions 
 as the "Boar Hunt," by Velasquez, in the National 
 Gallery. The painter often accompanied the sports- 
 men, and in the course of his life he made many 
 sketches and pictures of hunting scenes and trophies 
 of the chase, which for the most part are missing. 
 
 Isabella de Bourbon (1602-1644), daughter of Henry 
 IV. of France, and first wife of Philip, disliked sitting, 
 and we only know one portrait of her that on a 
 white horse (Prado, 1067). This picture is not alto- 
 gether by Velasquez, who only worked on the face, 
 the horse, and the landscape. Isabella was an able, as 
 well as an amiable woman, but Olivarez gave her no 
 chance to influence Philip. The king's temperament 
 subjected him to female influence, and the minister, 
 fearing the counsels of a wise wife, kept him well 
 supplied with mistresses. Philip had three sisters, 
 whom Velasquez painted. Anne of Austria, the eldest. 
 
DONA JUANA PACHECO. 
 
 CALLED THE WIFE OF VELASQUEZ 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORK 13 
 
 was the wife of Louis XIII. of France, and the be- 
 loved of Buckingham ; Mary, who married Ferdinand 
 of Hungary in 1629, had been much admired by 
 Buckingham at the time of her betrothal to the Prince 
 of Wales in 1623. Margaret, a nun in the order of 
 Barefooted Carmelites, was painted by Rubens during 
 his visit to Philip. 
 
 From the beginning, Philip treated Velasquez in 
 the most friendly manner coming, says Pacheco, 
 to the studio " almost every day," by those secret 
 passages hung with pictures, which led from the king's 
 rooms to every part of the old Alcazar. The monotony 
 of this life was broken in the autumn of 1628 by the 
 arrival of Rubens (1577-1640), who for nine months 
 was constantly with the king and Velasquez. At 
 his earlier visit to Spain, in 1603, Rubens saw little 
 of Spanish artists, and complained of their idleness, 
 ignorance, and incompetency. According to Pacheco 
 and others, he thought highly of Velasquez, and 
 delighted in his society, while his view of the king 
 appears in a letter to Peiresc : " He evidently takes 
 quite a special pleasure in painting, and, in my opinion, 
 this prince is endowed with the finest qualities. I 
 already know him from personal intercourse, as I 
 have a room in the palace, so that he almost daily 
 visits me." 
 
 Rubens worked hard during his stay in Spain, 
 painting portraits and copying all the king's Titians. 
 Of course Velasquez saw him at work, as it is on his 
 authority that Pacheco gives a detailed list of all 
 that Rubens did. Velasquez, moreover, accompanied 
 Rubens to the Escurial, where they climbed the 
 sierras and sketched bird's-eye views of the palace. 
 
14 VELASQUEZ 
 
 It was after his nine months' friendship with Rubens, 
 and, perhaps, owing to the influence of the Flemish 
 painter upon the king, that Velasquez was permitted 
 to undertake his first Italian voyage in the train of 
 Spinola, the conqueror of Breda. This great soldier 
 and statesman was going out as governor of Milan 
 and commander-in-chief in Italy. The expedition left 
 Barcelona on the loth August 1629. From Milan, 
 Velasquez went to Venice, where, according to 
 Palomino, painter to Philip V., he chiefly enjoyed the 
 works of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese. We 
 know, from other sources, that Velasquez preferred 
 Tintoretto before any painter ; indeed, we might guess 
 this taste from his own pictures, even if we had not 
 the criticisms of Francisco de los Santos on Tintoretto's 
 work in the Escurial criticisms which were inspired 
 by Velasquez, if not entirely borrowed from the 
 Memoria or catalogue drawn up by Philip's painter 
 when he arranged the gallery. Velasquez avoided 
 Florence, and went straight to Rome ; he copied for 
 some time in the Vatican, and he spent two months 
 at the Villa Medici, which he was obliged to leave 
 on account of a tertian ague. From Rome he passed 
 on to Naples, where he saw, and apparently liked, 
 his countryman, Ribera. In the early part of 163 1 
 he returned to Spain, bringing with him a portrait 
 of the king's sister, Mary of Hungary, which he had 
 painted in Naples, also two figure-subjects, "The 
 Forge of Vulcan " and "Joseph's Coat." 
 
 This journey to Italy ends the first part of the 
 painter's life. The long second period, which began 
 on his return, was closed by another visit to Italy 
 in the year 1649. Justi says that the first half of 
 
DONA MARIA 
 DAUGHTER OF PHILIP III 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORK 15 
 
 this period was " probably the happiest experienced 
 both by Philip and Velasquez." Still, it is true that 
 in 1632 Don Carlos died, and Philip lost his younger 
 brother, the Cardinal Ferdinand, who left Spain to 
 undertake the government of Flanders. Here the 
 cardinal acted with his usual activity as his brother's 
 agent, not only in politics but in picture-buying. He 
 made use of Rubens and his pupils to paint or to 
 procure the numerous canvases which Philip required. 
 The new palace, Buen Retiro, on the heights above 
 the Prado, had been presented to the king by Olivarez. 
 This must be decorated, and, later on, the Escurial 
 and the Torre de la Parada a hunting-lodge in the 
 woods near El Pardo. To this work the Court painters 
 now set themselves, with Velasquez at their head. 
 For this end he produced his " Surrender of Breda^^*. 
 and his large equestrian portraits ; and for this end 
 Caxesi, following the lead of Velasquez, painted 
 " The Repulse of the English at Cadiz " (Prado, 697). 
 Velasquez was now the unquestioned head of the 
 Spanish painters. He had already beaten them all 
 in a competition on the subject of " The Expulsion of 
 the Moriscoes by Philip III." 
 
 The painter was now introduced to a new sitter, 
 the king's little son, Balthasar-Carlos, who was born 
 in 1629, the same year as the illegitimate Don Juan 
 of Austria. In 1638 the Royal Family was further 
 increased by the birth of a daughter, Maria Teresa, a 
 Then troubles came thicker upon the court. After a/ 
 career of mismanagement, Olivarez was disgraced inN 
 1643, and the Queen Isabella, who had regained her ( 
 influence over the king, died in 1644. In 1643 those 
 invincible lances of Spain, which figure in "the sur- 
 
i6 VELASQUEZ 
 
 render of Breda," were utterly crumpled up by the 
 great Cond6 at Rocroi. After the fall of Olivarez, 
 Philip exerted himself and went in person to the per- 
 petual war which the French fomented in Catalonia. 
 In 1644 Velasquez accompanied him, and executed, 
 at Fraga, on the borders of Aragon and Catalonia, 
 the most coloured of his portraits of the king. 
 Opinions differ as to whether the Dulwich picture 
 may be the original or a copy of this work. The 
 heaviest blow of all now fell upon Philip ; his pro- 
 mising son, Balthasar, caught a cold at Saragossa, 
 and died in 1646. 
 
 During this middle period, various people of note 
 visited Madrid, and were painted by Velasquez ; 
 amongst others, in 1638, Madame de Chevreuse, first 
 the friend and then the enemy of Anne of Austria. 
 Her visit was immediately followed by that of the 
 Duke of Modena, a great hunter, much beloved by 
 Philip. But the favours of a friend and a sovereign 
 whose power was declining could not long keep the 
 astute Duke from a French alliance. 
 
 During 1634 Velasquez married his daughter Fran- 
 cisca to his pupil, J. B. del Mazo. About 164 1-2, his 
 still more illustrious pupil, Murillo (1618-82), came 
 from Seville, and spent two years under the guidance 
 of the master, who completely altered his views, and 
 turned him for a time to the serious study of nature. 
 Velasquez also renewed his friendship with certain 
 fellow-artists who were employed by the king about 
 this time. Alonzo Cano, Herrera, Zurbaran, the 
 sculptor, Martinez Montafiez, his old Sevillian friends, 
 were probably called to the capital on the suggestion 
 of the Court painter. Velasquez painted Montafiez 
 
THE SO-CALLED 
 *' DAUGHTER OF VELASQUEZ" 
 
I 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORK 17 
 
 in 1636 ; Cano, probably, before his conviction 
 for the supposed murder of his wife ; and the 
 satirist, Quevedo, certainly before his imprisonment 
 in 1639. 
 
 Velasquez left Malaga for Italy on 2nd January 
 1649, landed at Genoa, pushed rapidly through Milan, 
 only stopping to look again at Leonardo's " Last 
 Supper," and made for Venice, to buy pictures for 
 Philip. At Venice he made the acquaintance of the 
 poet, Boschini, who tells us that, although not very 
 lucky in his search for pictures, Velasquez, to his 
 delight, secured a finished sketch by Tintoretto for 
 the great picture still in the Ducal Palace. At 
 Naples, Velasquez revisited Ribera, whom he found 
 much affected by the elopement of his daughter with 
 Don Juan of Austria, who had seduced her when he was 
 sent by Philip to quell the revolt of Masaniello. In 
 Rome, Velasquez met many artists of note, Salvator 
 Rosa, Bernini, Algardi, Nicolas Poussin, amongst the 
 number. He had the honour of painting Innocent X. 
 in his robes, a task which he did not undertake till he 
 had practised on a portrait of his studio-fag the Moor 
 Juan de Pareja himself a painter. These two portraits 
 may be said to stand between the second and third 
 manners. 
 
 In the summer of 165 1 Velasquez was again at 
 Madrid. He became more than ever necessary to the 
 king, and honours fell thick upon him during this final 
 period of his life and art. He was made Marshal of 
 the Palace, an office of considerable honour, and, at 
 times, of no little trouble. He had to arrange the 
 royal journeys, court festivities, and tournaments. As 
 Philip, in 1649, had married a second wife his own 
 B 
 
i8 VELASQUEZ 
 
 niece, Mariana of Austria, a girl of fourteen the court 
 was more lively than when Velasquez left it, and he 
 had a good deal to do with painting, festivity, and 
 the arrangement and decoration of the various palaces. 
 By his second wife, Philip had the Princess Margaret, 
 born 1651, the centre figure of "Las Meninas"; Philip 
 Prosper (1657-60); Ferdinand Thomas (1658-60); and 
 his successor, Carlos II. (1661-1700), the last of the 
 house. 
 
 In 1659 Cardinal Mazarin brought about a marriage 
 between Maria Teresa and his young master, Louis 
 XIV. of France. The marriage took place on June 7th, 
 the two courts meeting at the Isle of Pheasants, in 
 the river which marks the frontier between France 
 and Spain. The tedious journey, the imposing cere- 
 monies, threw a great deal of work on the shoulders of 
 the Court- Marshal, and, a few weeks after his return 
 to the capital, Velasquez died, on the 6th August 
 1660. 
 
 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 attached surely 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 direct 
 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 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORK 19 
 
 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 aspect. That aspect 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 seek- 
 ing 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. Pictures of the pre- Italian epoch are "The 
 Water Carrier" (Apsley House), "The Adoration of 
 the Magi" (Prado, 1054), "The Shepherds" (National 
 Gallery), "Bust of Philip in Armour" (Prado, 1071), 
 full-length, "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 practice of palatial 
 decoration at Buen Retiro, gave a decorative character 
 to the art of Velasquez in the sec^ijph6d. Dne"' 
 tastes a flavour of Venetian art in the subject-pictures, 
 and one remarks something bold, summary, and less 
 intimate than usual, about the portraiture of this 
 
20 VELASQUEZ 
 
 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, 1075), 
 "The King as a Sportsman" (Prado, 1074), "Don 
 Balthasar and Dogs" (Prado, 1076), the large eques- 
 trian "Philip IV." (Prado, 1066), the equestrian "Don 
 Balthasar" (Prado, 1068), the equestrian "Olivares" 
 (Prado, 1069), "The Sculptor Montafi^z" (Prado, 1091), 
 "The Admiral Pulido" (National Gallery), various 
 landscapes, and a few studies such as "The Riding 
 School" (Apsley House) 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 picture - 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 
 had satisfied himself that Venetian art could not 
 wholly render his manner 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 fact, he adds the charm that we call im- 
 pressionism to such work of the third period as 
 " Innocent the Tenth," done in Rome, " Queen Mariana " 
 j (Prado, 1078), "Las Meninas" (Prado, 1062), "Las 
 Hilanderas" (Prado, 1061), "^sop" (Prado, iioo), 
 "Moenippus" (Prado, iioi), the so-called "Maria 
 Teresa" (Prado, 1084), "Philip IV." (Prado, I080), 
 
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI 
 
HIS LIFE AND WORK 2i 
 
 "Philip IV. Old" (National Gallery), and some of 
 the Dwarfs and Imbeciles in the Prado. 
 
 Some sojourn in the deadly capital of Spain is 
 necessary if one would know 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 picture essential to the full 
 understanding of the painter's art. No other collec- 
 tion can give a just conception 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, "Philip IV." (1066), "Olivares" (1069), and 
 "Don Balthasar" (1068); "The Surrender of Breda" 
 (1060), "The Sculptor Martinez Montafi^z" (1091), 
 "Moenippus" (iioi), " iEsop " (iioo), the "Maria 
 Teresa" (1084), "Las Meninas" (1062), "Las Hil- 
 anderas" (1061), and the series of Dwarfs and 
 Imbeciles. 
 
 These pictures have changed very little ; but, as 
 
22 VELASQUEZ 
 
 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 doof 
 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 comparison ; fortu- 
 nately, however, they contain for the most part 
 inferior pictures, the works of predecessors of 
 Velasquez, and a few early canvases by the Master 
 himself 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 COMPARISON BETWEEN THE THREE STAGES OF HIS ART 
 
 Trusting to report, and to the evidence of repro- 
 ductions, I expected to find " The Surrender 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 " Las Meninas," "The Spinners," 
 "iEsop," " Moenippus," and "Maria Teresa" (1084, 
 Prado). To some minds it is easier, and it is 
 always quicker, to excel on the lines of older 
 decorative conventions, than to start a new one on 
 the expression of a personal view of beauty. From 
 his early standpoint of the realistic painter, Velas- 
 quez first mounted to the position of great artist 
 by excelling in the traditional cult of beauty ; and 
 it was only towards the end of his life that he 
 divined a new art in the practice of personal im- 
 pressionism. " The Surrender of Breda " challenges 
 the greatest masters on their own ground ; it is 
 unworthy neither of them nor of Velasquez, but for 
 that very reason it is not the complete expression 
 of the Velasquez eyesight. It was painted when he 
 was scarce forty, and as an ornamental panel in- 
 tended to co-operate with other historical works in 
 the decoration of the Salon de los Reinos of the 
 23 
 
24 VELASQUEZ 
 
 Buen Retire. Decoration hardly demands or permits 
 of quick evolution or sudden novelty, and though 
 the irrepressible originality of the man still appears, 
 it is evident that Velasquez wisely attempted to 
 follow the lead of his favourite Venetian masters in 
 the execution of this task. And certainly he has 
 succeeded, for the picture might be hung in the 
 Ducal Palace at Venice. But to realise such an 
 ambition was by-play, and not the work of Velas- 
 quez's life. 
 
 If you would compare a realism, ennobled though 
 somewhat chastened by grand decorative treatment, 
 with a realism not only exalted but intensified by 
 the artistic principles of impressionism, you have a 
 fine opportunity at the Prado. When you enter 
 the long gallery from the street, walk down it some 
 way ; on the right, before you reach the Octagon 
 Room, you will see "The Surrender of Breda," and 
 facing it " Las Meninas," a work of the painter's 
 later life. " The Surrender of Breda " you may 
 admire according to your nature ; you may even 
 consider it the better picture, but by no means, as 
 is " Las Meninas," an absolutely unique thing in the 
 history of art. 
 
 As one views from a central standpoint the start 
 and finish of a race, so, from " The Surrender of 
 Breda," the masterpiece of his middle life, you may 
 look backwards and forwards, upon the early and 
 upon the late Velasquez. It will not be forgotten that 
 "The Surrender of Breda" was painted between the 
 two voyages to Italy. As might be expected, it 
 agrees in many points with other canvases painted 
 during that period in which Velasquez was so much 
 
THE THREE STAGES OF HIS ART 25 
 
 occupied with palatial decoration. By its size, by 
 its freedom of touch, by the variety and warmth of 
 its colours, by the complexity of its pattern, by its 
 dark foreground browns, by the quality of its blue 
 distances, it is allied to the large equestrian por- 
 traits, the hunting scenes and hunting portraits of 
 this period. Nor in its vigour of brushing, and its 
 force of positive colour, is it altogether unlike the 
 " Admiral Pulido " of our National Gallery and 
 "The Sculptor Montafi^s" of the Prado (1091). 
 The Admiral indeed is so unlike any portrait by 
 Velasquez that some have doubted its authenticity, 
 but it is very like the figures in " The Surrender 
 of Breda." 
 
 It is difficult to conceive that this great subject 
 could be treated less conventionally without some loss 
 of interest and dignity. No more than Veronese or 
 Rubens, could Velasquez combine decorative splendour 
 and historical clearness with the subtle mysteries of 
 real tone and the impressionistic unity that lift truth 
 into poetry. In other words, this kind of subject was 
 unfitted to bring out the more original and characteristic 
 qualities of Velasquez's genius. Subjects, however 
 grand in title and dignified in historical association, 
 are valuable to the painter in proportion as they give 
 him a pretext for making the most of what is beautiful 
 in his own art. No subject in itself can make or mar 
 art ; subject is indifferent except for its favourable 
 or unfavourable effect on the artist. Even the record 
 of a seen thing produces a noble or ignoble effect 
 according as it records a grand or a trivial manner of 
 using the eyesight, according as it shows a mean 
 anxiety about details, petty circumstance and wiry 
 
26 VELASQUEZ 
 
 pattern, or reveals sympathy with large shapes, subtle 
 nuancing, or lovely qualities of paint. Let a bad 
 painter call a figure by the name of what God he 
 will, and carefully accompany it with sacred symbols, 
 yet, if the forms are poor or ill-disposed, the figure 
 remains a mean one, and less grand than the study | 
 of some street porter that is fuller of the mystery of 
 fine seeing and the emotions of a higher view of form. 
 Remember, too, that what we call subject in painting 
 imports still less than what we call subject in literature. 
 This figure of the God and that of the street porter 
 differ in title rather than in subject, for after all, the 
 same model or true pictorial subject may have sat 
 for both, and it is surely the grandeur of treatment, 
 not the mere addition of symbols, accessories, and 
 titles, that should make an essential difference between 
 the two works. 
 
 It was perhaps, then, rather the purpose than the 
 subject of "The Surrender of Breda" which modified 
 the art of Velasquez, and made it akin to the work of 
 a Venetian. The canvas was to serve as a decorative 
 panel, a thing to be looked at as one looks at a piece 
 of tapestry ; hence, doubtless, its decorative flatness, its 
 variety of colours, its blue foundation, its brown fore- 
 ground, and its block-like pattern of huge chunks of 
 black and white and orange. It was scarcely the 
 business of Velasquez to compact this broad but 
 arbitrary illustration, explanatory of crowds and 
 costumes in a given situation, to adjust all this 
 coloured accessory, to plant this hedge of pikes and 
 lances against the distant landscape, to engineer the 
 foreground so that the legs and their enclosed spaces 
 might appear neither too distracting nor too utterly 
 
THE THREE STAGES OF HIS ART 27 
 
 unlike the truth, to give some sense of space and 
 distance but to give it gingerly, so as to bridge the 
 great gulf between the main group and its back- 
 ground. 
 
 Yet how admirably it is done. Compare its stately 
 figures with the coarse, dumpy men in "The Repulse 
 of the English at Cadiz," by Eugenio Caxesi. Caxesi 
 follows his colleague Velasquez in his idea of colour, 
 and in his view of the contending claims of open-air 
 effect, decorative unity and historical fulness. But his 
 reliefs are hard and even, his blocks of colour un fused, 
 his drawing clumsy, and his whole picture duller, more 
 spotty, and less arranged than "The Surrender of 
 Breda." In colouring, in suavity of effect, that great 1/^ 
 Velasquez compares with any Titian. Its principal 
 figures stand with as noble a bearing as any in painting. 
 Spinola and Justin meet each other with gestures so 
 poignant in expression, that they almost compel the 
 nerves to involuntary imitation. Something of this 
 dramatic aptness of gesture enlivens the series of large 
 decorative panels which Rubens painted for the Luxem- 
 bourg Palace. But the figures in the " Reception of 
 Marie de Medicis" abound in courtliness and pomp, 
 while the conqueror and the conquered of Breda, with 
 a more human though a decently ceremonious stateli- 
 ness, act out two of the most trying circumstances of 
 life. The figures form the knot of an admirable com- 
 position, but this central interest is rather prepared 
 by studied artifice than made important by the effect 
 of a focussed impression. Hence one is able to look 
 at "The Surrender of Breda" and imagine the centre 
 cut out, and yet the chief sentiments of the picture 
 preserved. The dignity of the two figures would be 
 
28 VELASQUEZ 
 
 scarcely impaired by the omission of surroundings 
 which, however well put in, yet exist for the purposes 
 of illustrative and decorative arrangement. 
 
 Turn now to " Las Meninas," on the opposite wall. 
 What a rounded vision swims in upon your eye, and 
 occupies all the nervous force of the brain, all the 
 effort of sight upon a single complete visual impression. 
 One may look long before it crosses one's mind to 
 think of any colour scheme, of tints arbitrarily con- 
 trasted or harmonised, of masses balanced, of lines 
 opposed or cunningly interwoven, of any of the tricks 
 of the metier^ however high and masterlike. The art 
 of this thing, for it is full of art, is done for the 
 first time, and so neither formal nor traditional. The 
 admiration this picture raises is akin to the excitement 
 caused by natural beauty; thought is suspended by 
 something alike yet different from the enchantment 
 of reality. This is not the reality obtained by the pre- 
 Raphaelite exploration of nature, which builds up a 
 scene bit by bit, like the map of a new continent. 
 The pre-Raphaelite painter realises the result of his 
 separate observations no more than a geographer 
 engaged on the survey of an unknown coast. He 
 will not conceive of his picture as a big pattern which 
 produces detail ; he compiles a great m.any separate 
 details, and accepts, though he has not designed, the 
 ensemble which they happen to produce. Now the 
 ensemble of "Las Meninas" has been perceived in 
 some high mood of impressionability, and has been 
 imaginatively kept in view during the course of after- 
 study. The realism of this picture is a revelation of 
 the way the race has felt a scene of the kind during 
 thousands of years. The unconscious habit of the 
 
r 
 
 
 w 
 
 
 i^li 
 
 1 
 
 i 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 H 
 
 X 
 
 H 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
THE THREE STAGES OF HIS ART 29 
 
 eye, in estimating the relative importance of colours, 
 forms, definitions, masses, sparkles, is revealed to us 
 by the unequalled sensitiveness of this man's eyesight. 
 From our present point of view "The Topers" is 
 even less real than "The Surrender of Breda." It 
 belongs to a lower order of generalisation. The mind 
 that conceived it failed to grasp it except by successive 
 acts of imagination. Its parts obey a purely formal 
 instead of an impressional unity. The composition 
 was, of course, designed to make a single pattern as 
 to lines and masses, but the scene, with its modelling, 
 colouring, atmosphere, and definitions, was never beheld 
 as a whole vision in the mind's eye. Velasquez rose, 
 I think, in " The Surrender of Breda," to a higher art 
 than he had dreamed of before he went to Italy. He 
 reached at least a decorative unity, though doubtless in 
 so doing he sacrificed the poignancy of " The Topers," 
 which is due to a succession of climaxes. Each head 
 is as strong as the best pair of eyes in the world could 
 make it. If you can call it the highest art to take a 
 number of powerfully - studied heads and sew them 
 together to make a group, then "The Topers" is as 
 fine a picture as you want. But the unity of a work 
 of art should be organic and pervasive, like the blood 
 in a man's veins, which is carried down to his very 
 I toes. 
 
 I As an art grows, everything that enters it becomes 
 I absorbed more and more into its constitution, and 
 becomes a feature in a living organic unity. With 
 the growth of music, composers felt the need of a 
 more logical principle of unity, than a mere succession 
 I of separate phrases and climaxes ; and as painting 
 developed, painters began to comprehend other and 
 
30 VELASQUEZ 
 
 more vital means of picture -making than the use of; 
 compelling lines and a formal composition. They had 
 learnt that strong points in a picture kill each other, 
 and that force in art is an affair of relation. Theyj 
 were to learn that there is a realistic as well as al 
 decorative meaning in different breadths of treatment! 
 The relative space and finish which a nose might; 
 arrogate to itself in a single head, must suffice for a 
 whole face in a figure group, if due proportion and a 
 reasonable width of view are to be preserved. A can- 
 vas should express a human outlook upon the world, 
 and so it should represent an area possible to the 
 attention ; that is, it should subtend an angle of vision 
 confined to certain natural limits of expansion. Now, 
 to group two or more studies of figures in order to fill 
 a larger canvas, either commits the painter to a wider 
 angle of vision, and consequently a more distributed 
 attention, or else it compels him to paint his group as 
 if it were removed from him far enough to subtend 
 only the same angle as the single figure of one of his 
 previous studies. Let him choose either alternative, 
 and either way a difference of treatment is forced upon 
 him. This is a point which demands serious study on 
 the realistic grounds of perspective, modelling, colour, 
 and definition ; but for the present it is sufficient to 
 settle it upon the merely decorative ground of com- 
 plexity of pattern. If a certain proportion of cutting 
 up recommends itself as beautiful and effective in any 
 one sketch or study, then unquestionably a compilation 
 of such studies must be a false method of composing 
 a large canvas. The large canvas should not express 
 a larger angle of sight than the small one. In a word, 
 the cutting up of a canvas bears a ratio to the size of 
 
THE THREE STAGES OF HIS ART 31 
 
 the canvas, and not to the square foot of space. So 
 that you may enlarge a one- foot sketch, but you may 
 not compile nine one-foot studies to make a three-foot 
 picture. Whether you compile actual separate sketches 
 ion one canvas, or merely paint parts of that canvas 
 i under different impressions, the fault is the same. 
 I If there is anything in this unity of impression, 
 I "The Topers" is not the best picture in the world. 
 jWe may point to its prevailing tone of chocolate, and 
 its hard, staring, too equal force of definition, both 
 ! faults the result of compiled observations. Certainly, 
 I each head is a marvel of handling, of modelling, of 
 [character, but has this handling or this modelling any 
 beautiful dependence on a great impression, or, as in 
 "Las Meninas," any relation to the whole view em- 
 braced by the eye? On the contrary, one of those 
 family arrangements in which several heads are sepa- 
 rated by headings, almost equally deserves the name 
 I of a picture. A Dutch portrait group, at any rate, 
 I claims quite an equal rank in the hierarchy of art 
 [Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," Hals*s and Van der 
 ; Heist's figure groups, are on the same plane of realism, 
 : although some of them may be less powerfully executed 
 than " The Topers." 
 
 Only a large mind takes a large view of a subject, 
 and not without effort, too, whether the matter in ques- 
 tion concerns art, philosophy, or practical life. For 
 instance, the ordinary amateur of music likes short 
 phrasing and a jerky emphasis, which makes the most 
 Df every accent, while the ordinary connoisseur com- 
 prehends and relishes the cheaper realism of the Dutch 
 Piasters, but cannot easily grasp the broader truths of 
 Velasquez. Small facts, shown by hard detail and 
 
32 VELASQUEZ 
 
 strong, frequent contrast, are more easily perceived 
 than the action of a principle which governs a whole 
 scene. To many the finesse of Velasquez seems weak- 
 ness, his atmosphere poor colour, his sense of natural 
 arrangement, bad composition. These admirers of the 
 Dutch realists would doubly admire Velasquez, if they 
 could learn to see that he was not only cleverer but 
 more sincere than Terburg, Metzu, Gerard Dow, Nicolas 
 Maas, or Van Ostade. These connoisseurs may not 
 question the beauty of reality or the dignity of tech- 
 nique, but the first they assimilate only in little pieces, 
 while they perceive only the immediate issues of the 
 second. Quite another objector to Velasquez is the 
 man who says, " What greatness is there in portraiture, 
 and in the painting of common life, what can there 
 be beyond *mere technique'?" For the moment we 
 may bid him look again at the exquisite human feeling 
 of "Las Meninas." Could the gracious attitudes of 
 these bending maids, the calm born pride of the Infanta, 
 the solemn gravity of the environment, speak more 
 eloquently to us if this were an Adoration of some- 
 body by an early and religious Italian? No, truly; 
 but the mind of the literary objector, which will not 
 obey the suggestion of paint, would then find itself, 
 under the more familiar impulsion of words, running 
 in an accustomed rut. Indeed, there is nothing lost 
 in "Las Meninas" of the natural forms, profound ex- 
 pression, and beautiful human sentiment of the Italian 
 pre-Raphaelites, while everything is gained in the way 
 / of a natural mystery of light, a true impressional 
 V unity of aspect, and a splendid perfection of technical 
 resources. Nothing that art has ever won is wanting 
 here unless it be composition by line, the charm of 
 
* 
 
 % # * 
 
 LAS MENINAS 
 
THE THREE STAGES OF HIS ART 33 
 
 the nude figure, and the rhythmic swirl of Raphael's 
 drawing. No great man is separable from his tech- 
 nique, and the difference between two great men lies 
 largely in a difference of technique, for technique is 
 truly the language of the eye. So that it may not be 
 amiss now to speak of the technique of Velasquez that 
 is to say, of his composition, modelling, colour, and 
 handling. We have already compared three of his 
 pictures, "The Topers," a work of youth; "The Sur- 
 render of Breda," a work of middle age ; and " Las 
 Meninas," painted near the end of his life. In examin- 
 ing the technique of Velasquez we shall refer to these 
 works, and shall describe others as occasion may arise. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE DIGNITY OF TECHNIQUE 
 
 It is not the lover of pictures, but the devotee of his 
 own spiritual emotions who needs to be told that tech- 
 nique is art ; that it is as inseparable from art as features 
 from facial expression, as body from soul in a world 
 where force and matter seem inextricably entangled. 
 In fact, the man who has no interest in technical 
 questions has no interest in art; he loves it as those 
 love you who profess only love for your soul. The 
 concert-goers who disclaim any technical interest in 
 music will be found to like a performance because 
 they forget it in trains of thought about scenery, 
 morals, or poetry. But one may walk on the hills to 
 become healthy or to escape crowds, and yet deserve 
 no suspicion of a fondness for beauty. Under a 
 mistaken conception of culture as the key of all the 
 arts and sciences, intellectual people too often feel 
 obliged to pretend an interest in arts for which they 
 have no natural inclination. They insufficiently 
 distinguish men born to take pleasure in the abstract 
 and speculative from those born to love the concrete 
 and sensuous the black-and-white from the coloured 
 mind. They cannot believe that the least taught 
 ploughman whose senses are in tune with the pulse 
 of nature may make a better artist than the man of 
 
 34 
 
THE DIGNITY OF TECHNIQUE 35 
 
 loftiest thought who is encased in nerves insensitive 
 to the quaHty of musical intervals or the character 
 of shapes and colours. The man of abstract mind 
 apprehends great ideas presented in the abstract 
 medium of literature, but in the concrete of painting 
 he is easily deceived by associations with words into 
 spending his admiration on mean forms, on foolish 
 labour, on purposeless colour. He looks at the merest 
 pretence of modelling, at the coarsest sham of colour- 
 ing, at the contradiction of the whole by the part, 
 at the burial of beauty in niggling, and his dull eyes 
 accept the imposture on the recommendation of his 
 humbugged hearing. 
 
 The " apostles of culture " grant but one gift 
 intellect to many-sided man, and accord but one 
 faculty of imagination to the dweller in a house whose 
 various windows look down five separate avenues of 
 sense. Often some of these windows are blocked, 
 and so many men rriust misunderstand each other's 
 reports of the external world, but the man of culture 
 too often keeps no window clean, and from a dark 
 chamber of the mind would explain to everyone else 
 the true inner meaning of what they see. It is this 
 prophet that despises technique because technique 
 differs as the material of each art differs differs as 
 marble, pigments, musical notes and words differ. 
 He hates matter ; because owing to matter the im- 
 agination in each art is a gift whose absence cannot 
 be compensated for either by one of the other imagina- 
 tions or by the abstract intellect itself Imagination 
 in words is not imagination in colour or form, as the 
 cases of Turner and Goethe amply prove. Without 
 matter there is no art ; without matter there is no 
 
36 VELASQUEZ 
 
 stuff in which imagination may create an image. 
 Sentiment is not imagination ; spirituality is not 
 artistic feeling. We all cry, laugh, and put on airs ; 
 we do not all imagine occasions and fashions of cry- 
 ing, laughing, and striking attitudes. We feel the 
 excitement of a street fight, yet we cannot all come 
 home and image that excitement as Dinet did in " Une 
 Bagarre," with its tempestuous pattern of uplifted 
 hands and swaying bodies quivering in an uncer- 
 tain flicker of shadows and windy lamplight. . It is 
 a sensitiveness to the special qualities of some visible 
 or audible medium of art which distinguishes the 
 species artist from the genus man. We are all spirits ; 
 it is' not in spirituality that the painter differs from 
 us, but in that sensitive perception of visible char- 
 acter which enables him to imagine a picture all of 
 a piece, all tending to express the same sentiment, 
 all instinct and alive with feeling. Moreover, any 
 difference that may exist between the material bases 
 of the arts, exacts a corresponding difference between 
 the qualities of temperament and imagination in the 
 artists who practise them, also between the aims that 
 are legitimate to the various arts, and between the 
 feelings and laws by which works are to be judged 
 and admired. Arts such as painting and sculpture, 
 that appeal to the eye and display their contents 
 simultaneously, differ vastly from those that unfold 
 their matter to the ear in sequence. Painting and 
 sculpture differ between themselves more slightly, 
 and there is still less difference between pictures, 
 whether realistic or decorative in aim, whether 
 worked in oil or water, tint or line, monochrome or 
 colour. 
 
J % * :* 
 
 PHILIP iV AS A SPORTSMAN 
 
I 
 
THE DIGNITY OF TECHNIQUE 37 
 
 An art of space scarcely differs more from an art 
 of time than one used purely from one mixed with 
 representation of life, with utility or with symbolism. 
 There is only one quite pure art namely, symphonic 
 music. Every shade of the complicated emotion in 
 a symphony by Beethoven depends entirely upon tech- 
 nique that is to say, upon the relations established 
 amongst notes which are by themselves empty of all 
 significance. The materials of other arts are more or 
 less embarrassed in application by some enforced de- 
 pendence on life. Words, since they serve as fixed 
 counters or symbols, cannot be wholly wrenched from 
 a determined meaning and suggestion ; architecture 
 satisfies a need of common life as well as an aesthetic 
 craving, and painting not only weaves a purely decora- 
 tive pattern, but also pretends to imitate the appearance 
 of the world. None of these arts tranquilly pursue 
 the beauties intrinsic to their medium ; none circle in 
 their orbit undisturbed ; all upon examination appear 
 to be, as it were, double stars, linked like Algol to a 
 dark companion. 
 
 I might sum these statements in one or two prin- 
 ciples. First, Art is not Life ; for life is first-hand 
 passionate emotion, while art deals with emotion 
 second-hand, retrospective and disinterested. Life is 
 variable, and a mixture of all materials space, time, 
 sound, colour, form, etc. ; art is limited, partially con- 
 trollable by the artist, and comparatively permanent. 
 Second, Sentiment is not Imagination ; for sentiment 
 precedes art, and is common to all men, while imagina- 
 tion is a special power to arrange the material of some 
 art in harmony with a mood. Third, There are as 
 many separate faculties of imagination as there are 
 
38 VELASQUEZ 
 
 separate mediums in which to conceive an image 
 clay, words, paint, notes of music. Fourth^ The 
 materials of the arts may be used with a double aim, 
 or solely for their own direct and immediate qualities 
 as notes and intervals in music, which derive their 
 character solely from the relations in which the artist 
 chooses to place them ; they have no fixed meaning, 
 and a dominant and a tonic are interchangeable. 
 
 Our faith in any art reposes, however, upon the 
 belief that its material, even if unavoidably adulterated 
 with foreign significations, is nevertheless as capable 
 as the sounds of music of expressing character in 
 virtue of artistic arrangement. Otherwise, no medium 
 of expression but the symphony should deserve the 
 name of art. Now, as paint serves both to record im- 
 pressions of the external world and to decorate a 
 given space and shape, an artist, however partial to 
 either, must give some measure of attention to each 
 of these aims. He must study how the eye takes in 
 nature, and how it takes pleasure in a canvas ; and he 
 must learn to reconcile these two ways of seeing when 
 they disagree, as they sometimes may. When you 
 look at nature, nothing remains absolutely fixed in 
 appearance. Size, colour, pattern, and proportion seem 
 to fluctuate as you change your point of view, move 
 your focus, widen or narrow your angle of vision. No 
 object seems big but by relation to a smaller, no 
 mass simple except when viewed as a whole in con- 
 trast to another, and no tone so bright that a brighter 
 cannot make it dark. But when you see forms and 
 colours set in the one plane of a picture, confined to 
 its scale of pigment, and permanently bounded in size, 
 proportion, and place by its four obstinate sides, then 
 
THE DIGNITY OF TECHNIQUE 39 
 
 you see them fixed in unalterable relations, and always 
 bound to express one and the same point of view. 
 The laws by which one pictures an effect on the flat 
 consequently differ from those that regulate ordinary 
 sight. Many collocations of form or colour that please 
 in a sunlit space of three dimensions with fluctuating 
 borders become intensely disagreeable in a flat, framed 
 panel. When he leaves nature for art, a man leaves 
 bright boundless space where he has no dominion for 
 a dark cloistered place where he is master master of 
 a medium susceptible of arrangement by harmony, 
 contrast, and gradation ; master to make his material 
 speak in character, follow a vein of sentiment, express 
 a mood of seeing. But he must learn to obey what, 
 for want of a better word, one may call the laws of 
 decorative effect. 
 
 Plainly, then, there are two interests to be recon- 
 ciled in a picture, the facts and impressions of nature 
 on one hand, and, on the other, the beauties and 
 exigencies of the framed pictorial world. A modus 
 Vivendi must be established between the imitative 
 and the decorative, and the compact between these 
 two may be called the convention of the art of paint- 
 ing. To object to the conventionality of art is to 
 believe in absolute realism, which, if possible, would 
 be a science and not an art. As things are, when you 
 merely draw a line on an empty canvas you commit 
 yourself to art, for you have given the line a positive 
 character by placing it in some relation to the four 
 sides of the canvas. To show a line quite uncondi- 
 tioned or uncomposed, one would require a canvas 
 without limits that is to say, nature. Convention, then, 
 there must be, but it need not be rigid ; it may vary 
 
40 VELASQUEZ 
 
 with the impressions of artists, with the facts of nature, 
 and with the characters of the mediums employed. 
 The introduction of perspective, for instance, was a 
 notable change in the convention of painting, since 
 it implied a limitation in the use of our general know- 
 ledge of an object to what can be seen from one 
 point of view. Different readings of the convention 
 by men of genius give rise to various styles of paint- 
 ing, and successively attach a varying importance to 
 the elements of technique as they deal with ideal 
 form or real form, local colour or atmospheric, detail 
 or general aspect. 
 
 This description of technique, compressed as it is 
 of necessity, is intended for those who hate "mere 
 technique" and despise "matter." Matter does not 
 level man with the beast or the stone ; technique is 
 not hateful, but only the point of view it expresses. 
 There is a silly, unimpassioned mind which looks on 
 nature without choice between things, which seems 
 choked with trifles, which possesses no touchstone in 
 its emotions wherewith to distinguish the important 
 from the foolish. There may be such a thing as 
 mere technique, but it is not what the vituperator of 
 realism would have it. In words, it is nonsense verses ; 
 in paint, mere decorative consistency, without the 
 meaning or emotion of truth to nature. 
 
 Technique in painting, then, must be understood as 
 the method of using any medium of expression so as 
 to bring out the character of a decorative pattern, or 
 to convey the sentiment with which you regard some 
 appearances of the external world. The two aims 
 become one when the decorative pattern to be en- 
 forced is suggested by the mood in which you happen 
 
THE ADMIRAL 
 
 ADRIAN PULIDO PAREJA 
 
THE DIGNITY OF TECHNIQUE 41 
 
 to look at your motif. If this be granted, then tech- 
 nique is as important to an art as the body to man. 
 Both of them appear and act for two hidden question- 
 able partners, sentiment and soul. Through them 
 these silent invisible partners can speak with the outer 
 world and influence the minds of men. When we would 
 infer the soul of another man or the sentiment of a 
 picture, we may do so only through the material 
 senses and their analogies. 
 
 Technique, then, is the indivisible organic body of 
 a man's conceptions, and cannot be rightly appre- 
 hended when studied in fragments. Yet, since the 
 exigency of words forces us to present things in 
 sequence, we must separate these living parts, and, as 
 it were, dissect them dead. This necessity we will 
 face, and will look separately at the qualities of 
 Velasquez's technique such as composition, colour, 
 modelling, and brushwork. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 
 
 When he composed a picture Velasquez no longer 
 relied altogether upon the arrangement by line or by 
 colour blocks of the older masters ; and when he 
 drew anything it was not according to rule of thumb, 
 canon of proportion, or even according to the later 
 acquired knowledge of anatomy. He drew, as modern 
 painters draw, almost entirely by eye, so that one 
 thing was not more difficult to him to see rightly than 
 another, and no receipts for representing thumbs, nails, 
 curls, or other whole objects can be detected in his 
 work. He wished any scene that he looked at in 
 nature to be so treated in art as to express the quality 
 and the distribution of the attention it had received 
 from him in real life. Only thus could he hope to 
 record the personal impressions which were his chief 
 interest in the world. For this reason he did not 
 look upon himself so much as an embroiderer of given 
 spaces as a trimmer of spaces to fit given impressions. 
 Perhaps the two ideas are comparable to the European 
 and Japanese notions of dressing. Hence Velasquez 
 when he painted nature held to no superstition con- 
 cerning the accepted places for strong points in a 
 canvas. Here was a scene which had imposed on 
 him a certain impression of its character, and this 
 
 42 
 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 43 
 
 view he felt bound to express by a shape of canvas 
 that would compose the scene as he had felt it. If, 
 for instance, the emotion of the scene had come from 
 distributing the attention over a vertical direction, he 
 must have an upright canvas, even in a figure group 
 like "Las Meninas." This was because to render the 
 group as it had struck him it was necessary to 
 surround it with a certain sense of aerial gloomy 
 space, comparatively empty of incident, but not of 
 tone. 
 
 That same intention is manifested in Rembrandt's 
 "Supper at Emmaus" in the Louvre. The towering 
 canopy of the darkened vaults which overhangs the 
 dimly - lit flickering table and the wavering figures 
 completes the impressional unity of the composition 
 and heightens the solemnity of the sentiment. I have 
 often looked at "The Marriage at Cana in Galilee," 
 by Veronese, in the Louvre, but could never feel that 
 the big space above the figures was connected with 
 them in any but the most formal manner. These 
 pillared galleries of marble, opening to the blue sky, 
 although they are incidents in the composition of the 
 "Marriage at Cana," scarcely seem to effect the mood 
 in which the artist regards his figure group. They 
 add no meaning to the general aspect of the group, 
 they cause no exaltation or depression of sentiment, 
 they affect the breadth of treatment not one whit, they 
 operate in no way upon the value of colours or the 
 comparative strength of definition. Therefore they 
 are a mere literary or explanatory note telling us that 
 the scene took place in certain surroundings, but not 
 affecting the internal treatment or sentiment of the 
 figure group. On the other hand, the vast gloomy 
 
44 VELASQUEZ 
 
 top of " Las Meninas," the empty foreground of a 
 Whistlerian etching, or the darkness of a mysterious 
 Rembrandt forms an essential part of a picture and 
 controls the force of colours and definitions, explains 
 the lighting and emphasises the character of the sen-j 
 timent which invests the figures. In fact, the surround- 
 ings of such pictures are as much part of the 
 impression as the figures themselves ; whereas it is: 
 impossible to say that the figures in the Veronese have 
 been painted any differently owing to the presence oj 
 their surroundings or that they have been conceived as 
 they would be seen in such a field of sight. 
 
 Modern painters have become quite accustomed 
 to cutting and composing a scene in the interests 
 of an impression rather than for the sake of mere 
 decorative consistency. Yet each time that this 
 necessity has led them out of the path of custom, 
 especially when it led also outside of established 
 decorative conventions, the public have wondered 
 and have cried out at the eccentricity. It was so 
 when Manet used a high horizon above the picture. 
 It was so when Whistler left more than half his 
 canvas, this time the lower half, bare and un- 
 peopled by incident. Most people failed to perceive 
 that it is sometimes impossible otherwise to show 
 the difference between an object far off subtending 
 a small angle of sight and the same object near 
 at hand subtending a large angle. For the sake 
 of dignity Corot at times consented to let this 
 distinction remain doubtful, but his compliance has 
 caused many to question the truth of his pictures. 
 It will be found that Velasquez, while he revealed; 
 new truths about nature, scarcely ever forgot that 
 
, 
 
 o 
 
 > 
 
 o 
 u 
 
 w 
 
 H 
 
 o 
 u 
 
 w 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 45 
 
 a picture must be a dignified piece of decoration. 
 But he certainly sought to attain beauty by methods 
 somewhat unlike those employed by his predecessors. 
 
 Velasquez decorates a space by the use of tone 
 more than any painter before him. Had Titian 
 seen " Las Meninas " he might have found the space 
 filled inaptly, as far as line goes, by a row of heads 
 crushed down into the bottom of an empty canvas. 
 And truly if you made a drawing in line after the 
 picture for Mr Blackburn it would appear a poor 
 composition. Even in a photograph " Las Meninas " 
 loses its rank among pictures, while on the contrary 
 the illustrated catalogues of modern exhibitions fre- 
 quently exalt a canvas to a position which its real 
 execution cannot maintain. Such pictures are often 
 work of illustrators that is, of men who con- 
 ceive a composition in black and white, and, in 
 painting, lose or bury their original idea in new and 
 irrelevant detail. " Las Meninas " was imagined 
 altogether as it exists in tone and colour ; it was 
 seen in fact by the tache^ to use a word of the early 
 Impressionists, and the vision of it was not trans- 
 lated into those lines which, if you remember, 
 Delacroix neither saw in nature nor wished to 
 :onsider the sole source of beauty in art. 
 
 An old master made all his space alive with a 
 swirl of flowing lines or built it compact like a 
 monument with blocks of balanced colour. Immense 
 :hunks of red, blue, orange white, brown, etc., are 
 itted into each other as if they were the separate 
 Dieces of a puzzle. On this system each area of 
 :olour may require a different and separate process 
 of working to secure the quality of its tint or to 
 
46 VELASQUEZ 
 
 engage it in a semblance of chiaroscuro and effect. 
 Such preoccupations hamper the attainment of any 
 unity except of line, of artificial harmony between 
 darks and lights, of decorative contrast between 
 colours. Indeed, of the mysteries and beauties of 
 true tone which Velasquez explored in the heart of 
 nature, and deemed proper to touch man's emotional 
 habits, these old men were comparatively ignorant, 
 or, if they had an inkling of such things, they 
 thought them altogether beside the question of art. 
 The old masters' drawings, their numerous and care- 
 ful cartoons, their very few notes of general effect, 
 show their inborn love of space-filling by lines and 
 definitely woven patterns. Their problem always 
 being to fit the given space, they seldom sew pieces 
 on to their canvases as Velasquez has done in 
 many of his best pictures. 
 
 The life-size portrait of Philip IV. in armour and 
 on horseback (Prado, 1066) is a notable example of 
 this practice. To each side of the canvas a strip three 
 or four inches wide has been sewn, while, on the canvas 
 itself, the pushing up of older contours reveals much 
 correction and change of outline. This increase of the 
 canvas by strips sewn on, common enough in the 
 pictures of Velasquez, makes one think that he differed 
 from his contemporaries in the way he set to work. 
 You rarely meet with this habit amongst the men of 
 the older decorative schools. They planned theirj 
 picture beforehand, and approached it from a previousl 
 composition carefully calculated to occupy and decorate! 
 the given space. It seems possible that Velasquez j 
 began a picture in quite another spirit; that he con- 
 ceived of it rather as an ensemble of tone than as a 
 
t % 
 
 . 
 
 
 PHILIP IV ON HORSEBACK 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 47 
 
 pattern of lines and tints. Unlike the older decorative 
 artists, Velasquez has left few drawings. Probably he 
 dashed in the main centre of the impression, and upon 
 filling and darkening the rest of the canvas found 
 sometimes that the centre required more elbow-room. 
 In the Equestrian Philip the strips are not added to 
 introduce any new feature or in any way to induce a 
 change of place in the figure to one side or the other. 
 They seem added simply to let the figure play in the 
 centre of a larger field. The dignity, the quality, the 
 sense of artistry in the presentation of a thing depends 
 very much upon its proportion to surroundings. So 
 much around it, no more and no less, seems necessary 
 to secure that it be seen under the conditions of sight 
 which produced an impression on the painter, and 
 which therefore must be reproduced to justify his 
 treatment of the picture. It might be worth someone's 
 time to inquire into the sewing together of these 
 canvases, to hunt out some reason in each case, to 
 unearth any half-buried tradition bearing on the 
 question. The main point seems to be that while 
 unusual amongst the older men this habit is common 
 enough amongst the moderns of whom Velasquez was 
 a forerunner. 
 
 If you walk outside of Madrid upon the bare slopes 
 facing the Sierras, you may see the reality which 
 underlies the Equestrian Portraits. Sit low down on 
 the ground and you will have this same bare burnt 
 foreground ; should a figure pass, you will see the 
 heavy blue of the distant hills low down behind its 
 legs, while its head towers up into a cloudy sky. 
 What he saw was endeared to Velasquez, and the 
 arrangement of any one of his pictures carries with 
 
48 VELASQUEZ 
 
 it the recollection of some actual occasion of sightj 
 It is so with his portraits and with his subject-pictures. 
 The two Philosophers, ^sop and Moenippus, stand 
 as they might have stood scores of times in any room. 
 Just so much space surrounds them as naturally falls 
 under the eye ; it is of the shape that best befits 
 their shape, and it is furnished with accessory of no 
 busier or more defined complication than the character 
 of the impression demands. The canvases in these two 
 portraits are remarkably tall and narrow, the heads in 
 them almost touch the top of the frame, the colour 
 is dark grey and atmospheric, while the general tone 
 seems to bathe everything in a nuanced depth of 
 distance and air. The aspect of the pictures in style 
 and composition recalls many of Mr Whistler's tall 
 dark portraits wrapped in the mystery of gloomy 
 interiors. Truth is the introducer that bids these two 
 men shake hands across several centuries. 
 
 Velasquez you may say was never wantonly unusual ; 
 and, astonishing as his compositions may have looked 
 to conventionalists, they appear to us to-day no more 
 unnatural than nature, and much more natural than 
 many modern experiments in art. In the arrangement 
 of a picture by Velasquez there is always some intention 
 to give the flavour of a particular impression, but at 
 the same time a great effort to preserve the sane every- 
 day aspect of nature. The fitting of a figure to its 
 space always corresponds to the way it is supposed to 
 be looked at, to the distance at which it is supposed 
 to be seen, and to the number and complication of the 
 accessories which share the dominion of the canvas. 
 True, in his early work, such as " The Adoration of the 
 Kings" (Prado, 1054), or even in the later "Topers" 
 
EL CONDE-DUQUE DE OLIVAREZ 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 49 
 
 and "The Forge of Vulcan," Velasquez appears to 
 compel things into unreasoned relation to each other, 
 but this is the result of that realism which overlooks 
 the general aspect of a view and studies the appear- 
 ances of its separate parts. Composition in such a 
 case cannot be said to influence the whole treatment 
 of a canvas, but only its formal outlines. Drawing, 
 modelling, definition of detail, balance of emptiness 
 and fulness are determined in their character by 
 successive study of pieces of the picture instead of 
 by a comprehensive view of the whole subject. The 
 faults induced by such technique are hardness, con- 
 fusion, spottiness, and the sacrifice of the mystery of 
 enveloping air and light to petty markings and exag- 
 gerated spots of local colouring. It will be seen that 
 hardness, confusion, and spottiness can be corrected 
 by the sole influence of a noble decorative ideal, and 
 that the unrealistic combinations of Veronese, Titian, 
 Rubens and others are free from these defects. Yet 
 their pictures cannot pretend to express fully the more 
 subtle mysteries of real light or to render an impression 
 of the whole aspect of an actual scene upon a painter's 
 eye. 
 
 When we are absorbed in the work of any great 
 I man whose art happens to express our own feelings, 
 I a natural and not unseemly enthusiasm leads us to 
 i set him high above all other artists ; but in calmer 
 moments we admit no comparison between men who 
 use technique to express quite different moods, senti- 
 jments, and perceptions. You may as well compare 
 Milton and Praxiteles as Beethoven and Palestrina. 
 , Tonality is not more potent and far-reaching in its 
 1 effect upon modern music than real lighting upon the 
 
 D 
 
so VELASQUEZ 
 
 arrangement of a picture. Both can steep the common- 
 place in mystery, can flash a new meaning into old 
 forms, can supersede worn-out conventions, can electrify 
 a dead passage, can sustain and bind together a whole 
 composition. Tone in a picture and tone in music 
 may not be better than the older methods of com- 
 position, but they awake quite different feelings in 
 the mind, and so it is difficult to like the clarity of 
 Palestrina and the rich emotional tempest of Beethoven 
 on the same evening, or to equally appreciate in the 
 same gallery the close solemn tissue of a Velasquez 
 and the arbitrary loosely-hung harmonies of the older 
 schools. The Prado contains some noble canvases 
 by Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck, Tintoretto and others, 
 but to an eye that has dwelt long on the subtle 
 nuances of a Velasquez, they seem to fall to pieces 
 or to be held together only by the most palpable 
 harmonic artifice. Yet there is art enough stowed 
 away in " Las Meninas," as becomes evident when an 
 engraver stumbles over the hidden pitfalls that lie 
 concealed beneath its suave surface. Touch one of 
 these many straight lines too firmly, miss the nuancing 
 of its accents, or tighten a detail of face or costume, 
 and some shrieking definition jumps at you like a 
 jack-in-the-box. 
 
 When you fail to grasp the ensemble of a Velasquez, 
 when you miss its profound and touching truth, you 
 can fall back on little else save a few disjointed facts 
 of common realism. The art of the thing escapes you 
 as the art of a Beethoven symphony escapes the man 
 who only catches hold of occasional tag-ends of tunes 
 hanging out of a preposterous and tangled coil of 
 sound. 
 
o > 
 
 THE DWARF "EL PRIMO" 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 51 
 
 Compared with those t)f Rubens, for instance, the 
 pictures of Velasquez may seem grey, gloomy, and 
 empty, especially if one should be in that sensuous 
 mood which pardons everything for the sake of sump- 
 tuous decoration. Let us think of a Rubens in the 
 National Gallery, "The Rape of the Sabines," that 
 flush-tide of the richest colour, which positively seems 
 to boil up in swirling eddies of harmonious form. Its 
 whole surface is swept by lines which rush each other 
 on like the rapid successive entrances of an excited 
 stretto, till the violent movement seems to undulate 
 the entire pattern of the picture. Certainly examina- 
 tion proves the feeling due rather to decorative repeti- 
 tions of line than to really striking actions in the 
 separate figures, yet the mind that has been possessed 
 by this miracle of agitation may well find " Las 
 Meninas " cold, empty, and stiffly arranged. The colour 
 of Velasquez we must leave alone for the present, but 
 the exquisite precision and the eloquent breadth of the 
 figures in "Las Meninas" surely weigh against the 
 attractions of a decorative consistency in the flow of 
 lines. The breathing of these young figures in their 
 stiff clothes, the quality of their flesh, the gait and bear- 
 ing of them, the admirable adjustment of the right lines 
 of this grave chamber in the old palace, legitimately 
 appeal to the eye by an interest of true pictorial art. 
 The arrangement of this group, which extends into 
 depth and darkness, shows exactly how it was felt in 
 relation to its surroundings. These fields of vibrating 
 space, this vast shadowed top, wonderfully modelled as 
 it recedes from the eye, are no more empty and useless 
 around the figures than landscape itself, which was so 
 long withheld as uninteresting wasted space. The rule 
 
52 VELASQUEZ 
 
 was and still is that every space must co-operate in the 
 effect, but not necessarily by lines, agitated colours, and 
 defined forms. True, it may take one some time to 
 understand the part played by the top half of "Las 
 Meninas," but when one knows its gradations it appears 
 as grand a setting as the Alps. 
 
 When you are penetrated by the solemn statement 
 of "Las Meninas," even "The Surrender of Breda" 
 seems full of a rhetorical if noble chattering, and to 
 pass from a fine Velasquez to any of the Italian 
 pictures at the Prado is to see them at great dis- 
 advantage. Not even " The Assumption," by Titian 
 (Academy, Venice), or "The Transfiguration," by 
 Raphael (Vatican, Rome), will quite content those 
 who want an art that fits the eye, who prefer a natural 
 and organic composition to a grand assemblage of 
 poses, draperies, wagging beards, contorted limbs, and 
 sweeping decorative lines. Few are the pictures that 
 show a unity embracing colour, definition, modelling, 
 and tone as well as line the unity of purpose that 
 we find in " The Last Supper " of Leonardo, in " Las 
 Hilanderas," " The Venus," and " Las Meninas," in 
 some Rembrandts, and in one or two works of recent 
 and living painters. " The Transfiguration " of Raphael 
 could well bear translation into line, but no one will 
 pretend that its chiaroscuro is affecting and mysterious, 
 or its colour bound together by any principle beyond 
 juxtaposition, repetition, and the compulsion of 
 harmonious line. Its upper part, moreover, has no 
 connection with its lower, except through symbolism. 
 "The Assumption," by Titian, although glorious in 
 the power of its colour and the magnitude of its 
 execution, scarcely answers to the finest ideal of 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 53 
 
 picture-making. As a composition it is too patently 
 broken into three parts. The upper group of the 
 Father and Angels seems quite divided from the rest 
 of the canvas, and in itself too dark, too distinctly 
 cut out, too poorly enwrapped, and altogether too 
 unmysterious. The picture, indeed, pleases one better 
 when the upper part is shaded out by the hand, and 
 the top of the canvas is imagined to die out in mystery. 
 As I was looking at it, I heard a lady say that it 
 was a fine picture, but worldly, and that she did not 
 like that great red figure in the front. This sounds 
 ridiculous, as, if one dislikes the red drapery, one 
 cannot like the picture, of which it is the very heart 
 and vitals, yet without doubt her statement had some 
 meaning. Probably the sense of worldliness came from 
 the hard definition of the top part, and the dislike of 
 the gorgeous red and black harmony from the sacrifice 
 of all subtleties of tone which such an explosion of 
 colour demands. 
 
 To put all this in as few words as possible, it may be 
 said that Velasquez uses tone as an important element 
 in his composition ; that, in fact, he utilises the ex- 
 pression of space as well as the expression of form to 
 give character to his picture. This is seen in the 
 modelled depths of space that encase and permeate 
 "Las Meninas," "The Spinners," Mr Morritt's "Venus," 
 the " ^sop," the " Moenippus," and the so - called 
 "Maria Teresa" (Prado, 1084). These we may call 
 impressionistic compositions, while the earlier works, 
 " Adoration of the Kings," " The Topers," " The Forge 
 of Vulcan," and others, we may call, in contradis- 
 tinction, reajiiitic. " The Adoration of the Kings " is 
 opaque and dark, without a sense of space, either in 
 
54 VELASQUEZ 
 
 the quality of the colour or in the arrangement of the 
 picture. There is no room in its crowded composition, 
 and there is no aerial suppleness in its tight lines 
 and its comparatively small and hard modelling of 
 surfaces. The pictures of Velasquez's middle life, as 
 I have said, are decorative in aim, and the equestrian 
 portraits of Philip IV., Olivares, and Don Balthasar 
 resemble '* The Surrender of Breda." The composition 
 of these is very much freer and broader than that 
 of the early pictures. Indeed, the canvases of this 
 time are the only pictures which show anything of 
 that scarcely definable air of pose and make-up which 
 one expects in the true "Old Master." The hard, 
 clumsy, over-detailed patterns of the dresses in the 
 large equestrian portraits of Philip III. and his wife 
 Queen Margaret (Prado, 1064 and 1065) which might 
 seem exceptions, are not the work of Velasquez. He 
 found these portraits already executed, and merely 
 touched them up in his own broader and more vigorous 
 style. The pattern of the queen's dress is plastered 
 in with little regard to the perspective of folds or the 
 changing value of lights. It is interesting to compare 
 its awkwardness in the composition with the beauti- 
 ful ease of patterns worked by Velasquez himself, as, 
 for instance, those in "Maria Teresa" (1084), or in 
 the Dwarf with a large dog. The queen's dress is 
 worked in the mechanically detailed style of work, 
 which can be seen in pictures by Sanchez Coello and 
 other predecessors of Velasquez. 
 
 From what has been already said, backed by a glance 
 at the illustrations to this book, it may be seen that 
 Velasquez relied very seldom upon parallelism of lines, 
 whirlpools of curves leading the eye to a centre, or, 
 
THE SCULPTOR MARTINEZ MONTANEZ 
 
 ALSO CALLED AlONSO CaNO 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 55 
 
 indeed, upon any other of the many traditional re- 
 sources of composition. But it would be narrow- 
 minded to blame either the composers by line or the 
 composers by spot. Different ends justify different 
 means in each case, and, moreover, composers, like 
 cooks, although they have principles, apply them ulti- 
 mately in practice at the dictation of taste. You 
 cannot easily convert people on matters of real taste 
 decide how much sugar they can absorb without 
 cloying their palates, or how much balance and sym- 
 metry of arrangement they can stand in a picture 
 without feeling sick at its artificiality. The work of 
 Claude affords an example of formal, rhythmic com- 
 position which has proved distasteful of late days to 
 many who still admire its colour. What is stranger 
 still, some lovers of Wagner now find the melody of 
 Mozart too formal, too simple, too evident. But while 
 radical and physiological differences of taste unques- 
 tionably exist, we must not be too ready to accept 
 blame due to partial blindness, or mere unfamiliarity 
 with new conditions, as the result of an unconquerable 
 physical aversion. When impressionists have depicted 
 figures looked at from above they have been told that 
 their pictures were unnatural by those accustomed to 
 see people painted on a studio throne. But when it 
 was first introduced did even perspective look natural, 
 or did it require custom to familiarise the eye with 
 its curious forms ? Artists should not be censured 
 for their admitted carelessness of public opinion, as 
 the most natural view looks unfamiliar to creatures 
 of habit, just as to a conventional society a realistic 
 representation of human passions appears madness. 
 In such a matter of taste as the point at which a 
 
56 VELASQUEZ 
 
 canvas becomes over-spotty can one pronounce with 
 certainty? There is a boiling point on the ther- 
 mometer ; is there a cutting-up point which determines 
 the ratio to the area in which you may subdivide a 
 picture? Here are two reasons why no one can lay 
 down the law with assurance. Firsts the point of 
 spottiness greatly depends on whether the eye habitu- 
 ally takes heed consciously of a large or a small 
 field of vision. Second^ a dangerous complexity of 
 detail and matter in a picture may be rendered com- 
 prehensible and orderly by rhythm in the design, but 
 then the spectator must be able to embrace the extent 
 and meaning of this harmonious arrangement. 
 
 Velasquez relies on tone, on the magic of true light, 
 on delicate adjustments of proportion between masses 
 to unite the many figures of " The Spinners " and " Las 
 Meninas." As to harmonious lines, he trusts to them 
 in composing a picture as little as he trusts to defined 
 lines in his rendering of form. He never cuts up a 
 figure or face by lines drawn round the eyes, lips, or 
 other features ; he gives a sense of intimacy by grada- 
 tions of tone rather than by fixed contours. Thus, while 
 a painted Holbein differs very little in method and aim 
 from a Holbein drawing on white paper, a picture by 
 Velasquez belongs altogether to another branch of art. 
 
 Harmonious line may often cover bad composition 
 of tone, colour, or mass, just as the wonderful tone 
 of Velasquez may at times dignify very ordinary 
 line. For instance, the line weavers constantly run 
 two or three pictures into one frame, so that if 
 you neglect their lines their composition-masses of 
 tone appear meaningless and spotty. If a painter 
 looks at one corner of the canvas exclusively he is apt 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 57 
 
 to put a smaller frame round it mentally, and so make 
 a fresh set of composition masses out of what was 
 only the subordinate detail of the original motif. Of 
 this fault Velasquez, at least in his later work, is 
 never guilty. 
 
 Within the scope of Velasquez's own work, and 
 even of his later work, the difference between Italian 
 traditional corriposition and the new impressionistic 
 composition may be easily illustrated. The " Corona- 
 tion of the Virgin" (Prado, 1056) is arranged upon 
 the system of balanced blocks of colour and har- 
 monious play of lines. But I have no doubt that even 
 in this picture a purist in old mastery would object 
 to the direction of the cherub's wings, which point out 
 of the picture and downwards, instead of in and up- 
 wards. A man who composes best by tone abandons 
 nature at some peril, when, as here, he undertakes to 
 show purely ideal circumstances. 
 
 In the case of "Las Meninas" and "The Spinners," 
 Velasquez unquestionably worked from Nature. In- 
 deed, there is in this country a large study of "Las 
 Meninas," four feet wide. It belongs to Mr. Ralph 
 Bankes of Kingston Lacy, and only differs from 
 the larger picture in that the king and queen are 
 not reflected in the mirror at the end of the room, 
 beside the open door. It is generally said that 
 Velasquez was painting the king, who sat in the 
 spot from which the spectator is supposed to see the 
 picture of "Las Meninas." During a moment's rest 
 the "Infanta" came in with her attendants, and the 
 king was struck with the group which fell together 
 before his eyes. Near him he saw the princess, her 
 maids, her dog, and her dwarfs ; a little farther on the 
 
58 VELASQUEZ 
 
 left, Velasquez, who had stepped back to look at his 
 picture ; farther still on the right a duenna and courtier 
 talking ; while at the distant end of the gallery the 
 king saw his queen and himself reflected in a mirror, 
 and, through the open door, Don Joseph Nieto drawing 
 back a curtain. The canvas shown in the picture 
 would naturally be the one on which Velasquez was 
 painting the king's portrait. Some, however, will have 
 it to be the very canvas of " Las Meninas," which 
 Velasquez was painting from a reflection in a mirror 
 placed near to where the king had been sitting. The 
 perspective in the picture hardly seems to agree with 
 this view, but rather makes Velasquez to have been 
 working on the king's right hand. It is not a matter 
 of importance, and the story of the conception of the 
 picture may easily have got mixed in the telling. It 
 is just possible that Velasquez was painting, or was 
 about to paint, a portrait of the Infanta only, when 
 the idea of the large picture suddenly occurred to him 
 or to the king. The canvas of " Las Meninas " is made 
 of separate pieces sewn together, and one of these jusi 
 contains the Infanta, with room for accessories or c 
 subordinate figure. Another tradition says that the 
 red cross of Santiago, which you can see on the 
 painter's breast, was painted there by the king's owr 
 hand, as a promise of the honour that was to be 
 conferred on him afterwards. 
 
 "Las Hilanderas" (Prado, 1061), or the spinners 
 in the royal manufactory of tapestry, was painted latei 
 than "Las Meninas," which it resembles in one oi 
 two points. In both pictures the top runs up intCj' 
 gloom, though the vaulted chamber of " The Spinners 1 
 does not tower up and dominate the composition s( 
 
A BETROTHAL 
 
I 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 59 
 
 much as the upper part of " Las Meninas." Both 
 pictures are conceived in tone and steeped in the 
 mystery of light, and "The Spinners," in a higher 
 degree, is cheered, in the midst of its deepest gloom, 
 by a vista opening at the back into a brilliantly- 
 lighted space. But in " The Spinners " the texture 
 of illuminated and shadowed air is richer and more 
 varied, it clothes a greater variety of forms, it fuses a 
 wider variety of tints, a range of stronger local colours. 
 In keeping with its more lively colour scheme, the 
 composition lines of " The Spinners " flow more sinu- 
 ously and harmoniously than the rigid forms of " Las 
 Meninas," and the masses twine and interweave in a 
 more rhythmic and balanced pattern. "Las Meninas" 
 is graver, nobler, and more imposing, also less expected, 
 less formal, and less aided by artificial elegancies of 
 arrangement. "Las Hilanderas" is more supple and 
 insinuating in its grace of pattern, more enchanting 
 and varied in its treatment of colour and detail. 
 
 In both pictures Velasquez is shown at his best. 
 He copes with the most difficult problems of modern 
 impressionism ; he works them out on a large scale, 
 and he pushes the rendering of his conception in 
 each case to the furthest possible completion. One 
 or two smaller pictures, single figures or heads, may 
 perhaps compare in modelling, in expression of light, or 
 in quality of colour, with these two great masterpieces 
 just mentioned, but on the score of composition not / 
 
 even Mr Morritt's supple and flowing "Venus," the ^ 
 ''Christ at the Pillar" of our National Gallery, or 
 '*^sop," "Moenippus," "Maria Teresa," and others 
 in the Prado, can rival the importance of " Las 
 Meninas" and "The Spinners." It will be well, 
 
6o VELASQUEZ 
 
 therefore, to speak of smaller pictures after dealing 
 with colour and modelling, and at present to pass 
 on to the landscape art of Velasquez. 
 
 In this branch of painting the large upright 
 "Avenue of the Queen," at Aranjuez (Prado, mo), 
 is enough to make us proclaim Velasquez a modern 
 and an impressionist, when we think of the con- 
 temporary Claude and Poussin. The view is seen 
 from a height outside the avenue so that the horizon 
 is half way up the canvas, and the avenue occupies 
 only the right hand side of the picture. On the 
 left you see the Tagus bounded by a hedge ol 
 distant trees, surmounted by an evening sky. This 
 scarcely promises much dignity of arrangement, and 
 yet the picture is fuller of grandeur and immensity 
 than any I can remember. The trees in two tal 
 towers of gloom, rise into a blue sky streaked witl: 
 floating filaments of cloud, while on the dusty roac 
 below, coaches and cavaliers, like a string of insects 
 cross the brown empty foreground and plunge intc 
 the deep recesses of the avenue. The canvas is i 
 large one for landscape, and it is treated throughout 
 with a breadth of style proportionate to the size o 
 the composition, and suitable to the implied distance 
 of the spectator from the frame. The manner o 
 seeing recalls the work of both Corot and Whistler 
 though neither of these painters ever saw it. Ir 
 this picture, as in his other open-air works, Velas 
 quez has cut the scene out of nature in ? 
 personal manner, so as to fit his sentiment abou 
 the place. He has insured the harmony of smallei 
 details, both in tone and line, by swamping acci 
 dental or contradictory forms such as the saw-Iikc 
 
< 
 
 X 
 H 
 
 H 
 H 
 2 
 
, 
 
 
 
VIEW IN THE GARDEN O: 
 THE VILLA MEDICI, ROM 
 
THE COMPOSITION OF VELASQUEZ 6i 
 
 edges of trees, or accidental and distracting holes 
 of light in the darker depths of shades. This 
 picture and the " Fountain of the Tritons " (Prado, 
 1 109), another view at Aranjuez, belong to the 
 latest period of Velasquez's life. The fountain is 
 notable for the soft, feathery handling of the trees 
 which veil the sky ; the figures seem out of scale, 
 and Carl Justi considers them additions by J. B. 
 del Mazo, son-in-law and pupil of Velasquez. Other 
 landscapes, such as the two finely-handled sketches 
 of scenes in the " Villa Medici," belong to the first 
 visit to Rome in 1630. 
 
 In landscapes, as in his figure-subjects, Velasquez 
 does not seek ideal beauties or acceptably grand, 
 poetic, religious, and picturesque motifs. He takes 
 a chunk of nature and can do without Florentine 
 trees, rocky hills, flowers and castles ; he frames a 
 slice of life and foregoes hoods, halos, and the 
 paraphernalia of ecclesiastical sentiment. The thing 
 that he paints has a flavour of its own ; owing to 
 a hazard of nature, owing to an accident of the 
 way he himself looks, the scene charms him by the 
 play of light on colours, or by some subtle re- 
 lation among proportions which gives grandeur, 
 delicacy, or an air of captivating greatness. 
 
 Of many qualities possible to painting and useful in 
 composition, proportion is at once the most enduring 
 in its effect, and the most unobtrusive in its compul- 
 sion on the eye. Some qualities exact a strained and 
 conscious effort of appreciation ; their full expression 
 in a picture demands a full attention from the spec- 
 tator. Now a work of art should charm us both when 
 we examine it and when we dream over it half- 
 
62 VELASQUEZ 
 
 consciously. Certain efforts of draughtsmanship, fo 
 instance, require study, and appeal to an intelligent 
 wide-awake interest in action, anatomy, and thing; 
 beyond the immediate presence of the canvas. The 
 subordination by harmony of complicated element.' 
 can only be fairly enjoyed by an intellectual combiner 
 with an intuitive operation. Mere contrast of coloui 
 sets the nerves on the qui vive ; it challenges criticism 
 it awakes the caprices of the individual taste. Balance 
 asks to be weighed ; geometrical relations set the spec- 
 tator measuring. Proportion, like a fine day, puts uj 
 into a pleasurable frame of mind without conscious 
 effort on our part. An unlearned man may look at a 
 Greek temple and be pleased without recognising it 
 to be a work of art. He may not feel any interest in 
 it or any wish to examine or inquire, but his nerves 
 are cheered or soothed as by woods, seas, or moun- 
 tains. Fine proportion always seems to have grown up! 
 naturally, it shows none of the difficulties that have beeq 
 painfully overcome, none of the snares of annoyance 
 that have been skilfully avoided. Proportion cannot 
 be done by rule ; it is experimental and intuitive, and 
 its effect, however potent, is unintellectual. To makei 
 it by law is to copy mechanically. The proportions! 
 of the Parthenon are for the Parthenon, and must bej 
 changed for another building. Of course, space-fillers; 
 use proportion, but oftener a more or less imitablei 
 harmony of lines ; Velasquez oftener proportion. Hencej 
 his art is less evident, less exciting at first, and less' 
 fatiguing afterwards. The more you know his work 
 the more you see in it, and what appeared the most 
 wonderful effort of artless realism becomes the most 
 consummate finesse of art. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 HIS COLOUR 
 
 Personal taste counts for much in the whole field 
 of art, and nowhere so much as in colour. Whether 
 we think of the painter or the onlooker, whether we 
 think of making or admiring a picture, it is equally 
 impossible to lay down hard and fast rules of prac- 
 tice, and to discriminate between good and bad with 
 scientific certainty. A native tendency decides for us 
 what kind of use we shall make of colour a differ- 
 ence in eyes, early habits, instinctive preferences, causes 
 one man to feel elation at the rich extravagance of 
 Venetian colour, and another man to be touched by 
 the natural poetry and sober dignity of a fine Velasquez. 
 As this is so, I need scarcely apologise for speaking of 
 my own feelings ; art is meaningless without personality 
 and its action can only be studied in its effect upon 
 oneself. 
 
 As a child I was fond of engravings after certain 
 pictures, but when I saw some of the originals I was 
 astonished that the painter should have spoilt the 
 nobility of his work by staining it with unnaturally 
 bright and spotty colouring. The breadth and solem- 
 nity of the black and white had disappeared, like the 
 grandeur of a figure when it is tricked out in tinsel 
 and motley. Yet I can remember that I was pleased 
 63 
 
64 VELASQUEZ 
 
 with bright colour in the real world, and now I can put 
 my finger on some of the reasons for these apparently 
 inconsistent tastes. In nature a vivid tint appeared 
 only as a rare splash, which set off by contrast the 
 charm of the prevailing sheet of soft silvery iridescence, 
 or impalpable umbery warmth that veils and reveals 
 objects in the chiaroscuro of real light. To show strong 
 colour thus governed by the tone of the ensemble is 
 not the same thing as to play with strong colour in 
 an artificial scheme of decorative harmonies, and you 
 may count on your fingers the men who have done 
 it with success. The black and white medium and the 
 Venetian glow, different as they are, agree in being 
 quite arbitrary expressions of the combined effect of 
 colour and light. As all art is convention, I merely 
 mark the difference between such forms of art and 
 naturalism without implying anything of praise or 
 blame. The man who sees the world through tone, 
 who feels the beauty of colour mainly in its relations 
 to this* prevailing principle of tone, cannot easily 
 appreciate a use of colour which neither frankly aban- 
 dons nature nor treats the mystery of real lighting 
 with poetic insight Brought up, as a boy, on Mr 
 Holman Hunt, Sir N. Paton, and the Scotch Academy, 
 I soon concluded that I congenitally disliked paint. 
 However, in later days at Fontainebleau, I became 
 intimate with Auguste Ortmans, a painter to whom 
 the emperor had given a studio in the chateau. When 
 the empress was away he showed me her Corots ; he 
 took me to see work at Barbizon ; he set me to paint 
 in the forest, and I learnt that colour was not neces- 
 sarily a blazing falsity. Then schools of art over- 
 whelmed me, and face to face with the difBculties of| 
 
VIEW IN THE GARDEN OF 
 THE VILLA MEDICI, ROME 
 
HIS COLOUR 6s 
 
 nature I was led off my legs, and, as usual, forgot 
 how the world really looked to me whilst I was prying 
 into the drawing, modelling, and local colouring of its 
 interesting corners. Being impressed does not imply 
 the imagination to recreate, otherwise we might very 
 much multiply the number of good artists. 
 
 There must be some who feel with me that many 
 bright colours of extreme chromatic difference confound 
 the perception of tone, and give the picture an air of 
 insincerity, shallow pomp, and decorative flashiness. 
 The solemn mystery of nature is lost for the sake of 
 a costumier's taste for courtly splendour. 
 
 You cannot easily bridge over the difference of 
 taste which leads one man to enjoy the subtle modi- 
 fication of colour by light, and another to revel in the 
 bright untrammelled play of colour used decoratively. 
 The decorative end may be attained gloriously and by 
 a triumph of art as in the case of the Venetians, but 
 to people of my sort it remains a triumph of artifice, 
 not a great victory of the emotions. We are recon- 
 ciled to it slowly and not until we have learnt enough 
 to perceive and to be awestruck by a skill which at 
 first escaped our ignorance. But the miracle does not 
 repose on the basis of our own feelings nor conciliate 
 the testimony of our eyes. It seems unphilosophic 
 and without roots in the life we lead. It cannot 
 touch the old associations of our race with reality, or 
 pull upon nerves that have been fashioned by the 
 emotions of a thousand generations. Now, great work 
 to those who make it and to those who feel a vital 
 sympathy with it never appears wholly decorative in 
 aim. In proportion to our native blindness or aver- 
 sion to the point of view taken, so the decorative aim 
 B 
 
66 VELASQUEZ 
 
 seems to preponderate over the natural or realistic. 
 To some men, Whistler seems to blot out nature in 
 arbitrary fuliginousness when he meant to coax beauty 
 out of the heart of what he saw. To some, Velasquez 
 appears to be a decorator with an unaccountable 
 taste for certain cold harmonies of a restrained kind, 
 turning upon black and grey, which he manages to 
 manipulate with some cleverness. To me, again, he 
 is nothing of the sort, and now that he has shown 
 me the way, I can see a Velasquez wherever I please. 
 
 To the unthinking, colour is absolute, and its quality 
 in every case inherent to each particular tint. It is 
 impossible here to argue against such a conviction, 
 but one may point to the blue complementary shadows 
 on white chalk, and to the effect of coloured clothes 
 on people's complexions. I have observed that a piece 
 of coarse green pastel which made a dark mark against 
 the foreground grass of a freshly-painted landscape, 
 relieved as a light spot against the apparently blue 
 and ethereal sky of a Claude. Such is the power of 
 the relations within the range of a key. When we 
 call a single colour beautiful or ugly we unconsciously 
 compare it with the general hue of nature as a back- 
 ground. 
 
 It follows from the interdependence of colours and 
 from the compelling power of key relations, that 
 whether we look at imitative pictures, decorative 
 patterns, or natural scenes, we shall see colours differ- 
 ently, according as it is our habit to embrace large or 
 small fields of sight under one impression. You may 
 choose a wall-paper in bed from a two-foot pattern 
 close at hand, and experience some surprise when you 
 see it hung on an empty thirty-foot wall. So, when 
 
HIS COLOUR 6j 
 
 the primitive realist tints small separate objects by a 
 process as near matching as possible, we cannot wonder 
 that his picture, which contains some hundreds of such 
 matches, should look unnatural. A realist of broader 
 perceptions compares the effect of colour againt colour, 
 while the impressionist notes or imagines the general 
 tone of the whole field which he paints, and tihen 
 determines the quality and value of spots by their 
 relation to this perceived ensemble. These ways of 
 looking give rise to quite different sentiments about 
 external nature. ^^ 
 
 In all kinds of really artistic work, whether decora- 
 tive, realistic; or impr essfenist, one sees evidence of 
 that liking for unity of some kind which pervades 
 every art. In painting it may appear in line, chiaros- 
 curo, colour, or in a combination of all the qualities. 
 An inborn sense of decorative colour seems to recom- 
 mend a unity of richness, in fact a kind of varnished 
 glow, to the natural man. You see it in the love for 
 reflections, particularly in rather dirty water, in the 
 taste for Claude Lorraine glasses, in the passion for 
 the old varnish that softens the hues of a picture and 
 solves them in a warm and luscious juice. The world 
 in general admires the harmonising effect of time 
 upon the tints of a picture, and the artist of a de- 
 corative turn of mind has been greatly influenced by 
 the beauty of old colour. Nevertheless, the lover of 
 nature feels cheated of dear and familiar emotions 
 when he sees some arbitrary decorative principle em- 
 ployed to effect this much-desired fusion of colours. 
 It may become the decorator to conceive a scheme 
 of colouring, but it behoves the naturalist to find in 
 nature the bond that will unite and beautify colour. 
 
6S VELASQUEZ 
 
 In this case, of course, one means by nature the man*s 
 impression of the colour-effect of the whole field of 
 vision about to be painted. In virtue of this impres- 
 sionistic way of seeing, an artist gives his pictures a 
 unity of colour which is significant as well as decora- 
 tive in its beauty. Now, it is evident that much of 
 the significance of such colour will be lost to eyes 
 that habitually take in a smaller field of impression 
 than is taken by the painter. Thus, there are many 
 people to whom the colouring of a Velasquez looks 
 cold, dry, and inexplicably grey. Velasquez aimed at 
 the cool effect of silvery light, and if you look at 
 the ensemble of his picture as he looked at nature, yon 
 will rarely see a poor passage of colour. 
 
 No pictures maintain such a close unity of key 
 as those of Velasquez. But this close unity of key 
 corresponds to a real perception of nature. When 
 a lady in a brightly-coloured hat passes one of his 
 canvases, it is true that you see the whole picture 
 of one tone in contrast to the hat. Yet the key i 
 so subtly varied, so delicately nuanced, that the 
 picture, unless through such a contrast, appears to be 
 a luminous tissue of air, not definitely red, green 
 black, or yellow. But "Las Meninas," even wher 
 subjected to this test of contrast with real people 
 sitting on a bench before it, preserves its appearance 
 of truth and natural vigour. Its colour relations con 
 tinue to look as subtle and as naturally complex aj 
 before; and when you look at both nature and the 
 picture, your eye only seems to pass from one roon 
 into another. The sense of space and roundness ii 
 the real room is not greater than in the paintec 
 room. On the other hand, contrast with the rea 
 
o 
 < 
 
 Q 
 
 < 
 
 Pi 
 
 u 
 
 pli 
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HIS COLOUR 69 
 
 world exposes no exaggerated reliefs, no over-trenchant 
 definitions, no false lighting in "Las Meninas." It 
 is, in fact, neither too tame nor too swaggering and 
 theatrical in its treatment of natural appearances. 
 When purely decorative, a close unity of key may 
 sometimes result in the case of old pictures from age 
 and varnish, and only sometimes from the painter's 
 intention, while in the case of modern work it occa- 
 sionally comes from a palpable disillusionising glaze 
 of warm colour sloshed over crudity of value. The 
 pictures of Velasquez, though a little duller than they 
 were, have changed less than those of most painters, 
 and they show no traces of glazing or saucing ; in- 
 deed, they are among the few old pictures that have 
 not gained by time. 
 
 The general principle which unites the colours of 
 his later pictures was reached by Velasquez, neither 
 through that feeling for decorative fitness which 
 governed the work of his middle period nor entirely 
 through the inborn Spanish love of dark hues that we 
 see in Ribera. It comes from a broader and more 
 imaginative outlook upon the values of colour as they 
 are affected by juxtaposition, by atmospheric condi- 
 tions, and, above all, by their inclination to the source 
 of light. This view of the aspect of nature led him to 
 study not only black and white but chromatic tone. 
 A change of the plane on which a colour lies tends to 
 make it not only lighter or darker, but to change its 
 hue to dose it with some proportions of blue, yellow 
 or red. Velasquez recreates the aspect of a place and 
 its conditions of lighting so convincingly that one feels 
 able to imagine the value which any local tint would 
 receive if introduced into any position in the picture. 
 
70 VELASQUEZ 
 
 True, he seldom chooses a subject from nature which 
 contains many bright local tints, but he always treats 
 those he admits with a perfect mastery of the resources 
 of colour. He is as subtle a colourist as real light itself, 
 which veils even a monochromatic subject in a dress of 
 coloured tissue. Indeed, the delicate colourist is never 
 better proved than when he would paint the chromatic 
 nuances of light upon a motif whoso, chief local tints are 
 black or white. By his treatment of blacks in such 
 pictures as "Moenippus," "Philip IV. Old" (Prado, 
 1080), and "The Sculptor Montan^s" (Prado, 1091), 
 Velasquez amply demonstrates the amazing finesse of 
 his eye. 
 
 The beggar Moenippus in his faded black cloak, 
 towers up to the top of the narrow canvas which repre- 
 sents him standing, with a book and jar at his feet, 
 against the bare grey wall of a dim and dusty garret. 
 A great shadow wraps the feet ; but, above, the figure 
 is tilted back on the hip somewhat after the manner of 
 Mr Whistler's "Lady Archibald Campbell." Thus a 
 discreet light skims the upper half of the man, gently 
 silvering the rusty black and revealing the shape of the 
 shoulder and the character of the pose. The beauty 
 of this passage of colour becomes more patent if one 
 notes the different quality of the black in " Portrait of 
 a Man" (Prado, 243) by Greco (1548-1625), who painted 
 portraits in Spain before the days of Velasquez. 
 . Greco opens a pit or hole of black asphalt ; Velasquez 
 H flushes the blacks of Moenippus with a hundred nuances 
 of greenish light. Although he could see the finest 
 shades of distinction in dark tones, Velasquez was no 
 colourist in the eyes of those who see little difference 
 between black, Van Dyke brown, or Prussian blue until 
 
MOENIPPUS 
 
HIS COLOUR ^\ 
 
 they are plentifully diluted with white. These men 
 are the drunkards of colour. We will not deny that 
 they like it ; both the gourmet and the gourmand may 
 be said to like food and yet we give them by no means 
 an equal reputation for taste. 
 
 In the early full-length "Don Carlos" (Prado, 1073) 
 by Velasquez, the blacks compared with those in the 
 *' Moenippus " look hard, unaerial, and scarcely obedient 
 to the light. This comparison of the early and late 
 treatment of local blacks by Velasquez may be paral- 
 leled by a comparison of his general colour in the first 
 period and in the last. " The Forge of Vulcan " (Prado, 
 1059), dating from about 1630, the end of the first 
 period, is, as it were, conveyed in a vehicle of brown, 
 not at all luminous and aerial as the atmosphere of the 
 later silvery works, " The Spinners," " Las Meninas," 
 "The Venus," "Moenippus," "Philip IV." (Prado, 
 1080), and "Maria Teresa" (Prado, 1084). This brown 
 of the " Vulcan " is an almost monochromatic tissue of 
 tone which accompanies and unites the colour of the 
 picture. It is almost as positive as the brown bitu- 
 minous vehicle used some twenty years ago by persons 
 supposed to have been educated at Munich. Few 
 strong local tints are embedded in the brown tone of 
 the " Vulcan " ; you have nothing in the subject more 
 chromatic than the flesh tints of the dark blacksmiths, 
 and the lighter ones of Apollo, a yellow drapery, and, 
 on the anvil, one spot of glowing iron. The rest of the 
 picture consists of originally greyish colours, drowned 
 in a brown vehicle. It is curious, by the way, that the 
 angel in " Christ at the Pillar " (National Gallery, date 
 1639) is the same person or the same type of person as 
 the Apollo in the "Vulcan" of 1630. The National 
 
 L 
 
72 VELASQUEZ 
 
 Gallery picture is greyer and more silvery than the 
 " Vulcan," but it still shows something of the dryness 
 and hardness which was to be entirely abandoned in 
 the last period. 
 
 Vivid colours occur now and again in the subjects 
 chosen by Velasquez, as, for instance, the pink scarf in 
 "The Equestrian Philip" (Prado, 1066), the draperies, 
 etc., in " The Coronation of the Virgin " (Prado, 1056), 
 the red cloth in " The Venus," the curtain and the 
 tapestry in "The Spinners," and touches of rose and 
 red in "Maria Teresa" (Prado, 1084), but they are 
 certainly not frequent. The " Coronation of the Virgin," 
 though painted in the third period, is of a conventional 
 Italian style in its composition ; and it is not surprising 
 that a picture with fluttering draperies, rounded clouds, 
 cherub heads, and all the apparatus of a religious work, 
 should be highly coloured in unrealistic blues, pinks, 
 and purples. Of characteristic canvases by Velasquez, 
 the one in which real atmosphere plays upon the widest 
 range of colour is perhaps " Las Hilanderas," otherwise 
 "The Spinners" (Prado, 1061). 
 
THE CORONATION OF THE VIRGIN 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 HIS MODELLING AND BRUSHWORK 
 
 While speaking of colour one has gone some way 
 towards describing the office of modelling ; but there 
 remains a little to say about this important subject. 
 Modelling is the basis of the art of painting, the master- 
 trick of the craft, since it is imposed upon the painter 
 by the very convention which compels him to express 
 depths of space and inclinations of surface by shades of 
 colour laid on one plane. The shortest if not the best 
 description of the convention of painting is given when 
 you say that it compels you to have nothing to do with 
 anything that cannot be shown at one view in a glass. 
 This implies the single point of sight of perspective and 
 the single focus of impressionism. In fact, the impres- 
 sionists are the descendants of the perspectivists ; they 
 fight the same battle, and are pledged to the same 
 cause, to show, not how things are, but how they seem. 
 Notwithstanding the contrary opinion of certain painters, 
 I cannot but consider modelling the most valuable 
 acquirement of an impressionist, as with it he may 
 render his impression of shape and yet neither rivet the 
 eye nor detain the attention by defined lines or borders. 
 It seems illogical, and it certainly violates the continuity 
 of light to dispense with lines round large masses, while 
 you carefully draw them with a rigger round eyes, 
 73 
 
 / 
 
74 VELASQUEZ 
 
 mouths, noses, buttons, and other details. Brushwork 
 then enters into the question, as it is the means used 
 to carry out the logic of modelling, especially in the 
 smaller sub-divisions of a picture where the minuter 
 forms of detail must often be suggested by texture or 
 a device of handling. 
 
 If one must divide the indivisible and name some 
 quality of technique in which Velasquez most patently 
 excelled, one feels inclined to choose his modelling. In 
 expressing form by real light he finally attained to that 
 Greek combination of broad, majestic beauty of effect, 
 with the neatest perfection of finish. Other men, it will 
 be said, have shown a fine conimand of form before him, 
 and Velasquez himself could surely model well enough 
 in his early works. The back of the blacksmith in 
 "The Forge of Vulcan" and the arm of Bacchus in 
 " The Topers," as well as the heads in that picture, are 
 superb bits of modelling. In what consists the differ- 
 ence between this early rendering of form and the 
 modelling of the later pictures ? To some extent per- 
 haps in a growing feeling for comparative strengths of 
 definition, which enabled him to avoid tricky or arbitrary 
 expression, and to pass from piecemeal modelling to 
 impressionistic modelling. A definition may not dis- 
 appear in nature if you pry closely into it ; but, when 
 looked at together with a second one, firmer and yet 
 soft in the ensemble^ the first must often be made to dis- 
 appear if due relative force is to be kept. A step in 
 Velasquez's progress in comparative definition may be 
 seen by comparing portraits of the second period, like 
 the " Sculptor Montafids " (Prado, 1091), or the "Admiral 
 Pulido," of the National Gallery, with close tight early 
 work, such as " Philip IV." (Prado, 1070), or even Philip, 
 
> 
 
 O 
 
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 Pi 
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 H 
 
HIS MODELLING AND BRUSHWORK 75 
 
 full length, in the National Gallery. Though the 
 pictures of the second period are certainly freer, broader, 
 and less hard than those of the first, perhaps they have 
 lost something of the intimate rendering of form which 
 was to be regained in final work, such as " Philip IV." 
 (Prado, 1080), and " Philip Old " (National Gallery). 
 
 Let us admit then that other men have felt form 
 before Velasquez ; it was his merit to have shown it 
 under one effect of light and to have expressed it with 
 the sorcery of truth and not by any kind of arbitrary 
 modelling. The term needs explanation ; I have used 
 it for ten years, but the other day some one asked me 
 if it meant the use of idealised forms instead of the 
 actual shape of the model. Here, however, the term 
 " arbitrary " applies to the want of reality in the means 
 used to express them, and not to any lack of actuality 
 in the forms themselves. Idealised form can be rendered 
 with the least possible convention, and with a fully 
 coloured and real treatment of light, whereas actual 
 form can be rendered with the much more conventional 
 and unreal mediums of pure line or black and white 
 monochrome. An extreme but well-known instance of 
 arbitrary modelling may be seen in those maps which 
 express the shape of a country by contour lines drawn 
 at successive heights. The steeper the ground the 
 closer the lines approach, till on a cliff they merge into 
 a deep shade. If used as modelling, this arbitrary 
 principle would assume a spectator in the zenith whose 
 eye is the source of light, so that horizontal planes 
 appear whitest and vertical ones darkest. 
 
 It is not necessary to describe all the kinds and 
 degrees of arbitrariness in modelling which have been 
 used both before and after Velasquez ; a word or two 
 
76 VELASQUEZ 
 
 must suffice. Leonardo da Vinci, when he was writing 
 of modelling, blames the conventionality of previous 
 practitioners as out of correspondence with the truths 
 of real light. He accuses them of modelling by means 
 of a monochromatic tint used in three or four bands of 
 increasing darkness from full light to deep shadow. 
 These gradation tints, something, by the way, like those 
 used now in mechanical drawings, could be mixed with 
 the local hue of a drapery or a flesh tint, or else might 
 be superimposed in glazes. In both cases a sort of 
 obligato accompaniment in monochrome was called 
 upon to produce all the modifications of local colour 
 that we understand by the word "values." Without 
 doubt, succeeding painters have used more subtle 
 methods of modelling, but whether they attain to the 
 beauty and finesse of Raphael, of Rubens, of Titian, 
 of Rembrandt, or only of Sir E. Burne-Jones, their 
 modelling seems arbitrary and their beauties conven- 
 tional beside the naturalism of Velasquez. 
 
 When we see a quite white world after a heavy fall 
 of snow, we do not see a monochrome but the chromatic 
 hues of a coloured atmospheric effect. Sometimes it is 
 a tissue of rose, blue, and yellow all in a high fairy-like 
 key, or again it is a harmony of brown and silver ; but, 
 whatever it may be, it goes far to disprove the theory 
 that a shadow is only a darker shade of a light. The 
 shapes of this equally white ground are revealed by the 
 various inclination of their slopes to the light, yet this 
 light is yellow on one slope, blue on another, and by no 
 means merely darker or brighter shades of one tint. 
 The distances of the snow-fields are indicated by their 
 absorption in atmospheric hues, but the foreground is 
 not another shade of tHe colour that wraps the distance. 
 
HIS MODELLING AND BRUSHWORK jj 
 
 A red, blue, or yellow world would also model chro- 
 matically under light, and so we may be sure that every 
 change of plane in the real compositely-hued world 
 should correspond in the picture to a change of value 
 in true colour. 
 
 Velasquez's idea of finish in modelling consisted 
 in making his rendering of light logical, convincing, 
 and beautiful. He taught himself not to over-model 
 every bit of a picture because he saw that the 
 range of available values is graduated according to 
 the inclination of real planes and not according to 
 their size or structural importance. To burden a 
 plane with smaller planes, perhaps steeper or equally 
 steep, means frittering away the values that should 
 not only distinguish, but eloquently proclaim im- 
 portant changes of surface. The constant repetition 
 of sharp accidents tires the eye ; it is like the 
 false cry of wolf that forestalls the effect of the 
 really momentous occasion. This appears especially 
 evident in landscape, where it is counted unwise to 
 pretend to fully outline and model objects too small 
 to properly exhibit the effect of shadow and light. 
 The artist who insists on giving such accidents an 
 important treatment generally employs a false kind 
 of definition which really belongs to the convention 
 of outline drawing and not to that of full-toned 
 oil painting. Indeed, the traditions of laborious or 
 gorgeous styles of the past linger incongruously in 
 later art, as buttons and lappets, the relics of former 
 fashions, remain on the coats we wear to-day. In 
 a difficult passage of naturalistic modelling, painters 
 are apt to take refuge in the older conventions of 
 line, which contradict and destroy the consistency 
 
78 VELASQUEZ 
 
 and mystery of revelation by true light. If bad 
 tone is often a relic of decorative or monochro- 
 matic styles, hard and linear definition often comes 
 from traditions of primitive draughtsmanship. 
 
 In the art of outline drawing itself, it is held 
 difficult to perceive the true sweep and sentiment 
 of a long line which contains small indentations 
 often steeper in their slopes than the main inclina- 
 tion of the large contour. In this case, however, 
 experience proves that breadth of treatment can be 
 cultivated by training. It is said that in France 
 drawing can be taught even to a man without a 
 turn for it, but, it may be added, drawing with no 
 merit except that of a proportionate subordination 
 of parts. However this may be, it is certainly 
 more difficult to teach a man to perceive relative 
 values of colour and relative forces of definition. 
 He must not only learn to sweep his eye along 
 one line, but to embrace a whole area with an 
 imaginative grasp of sight. Hence it is easy to 
 observe contiguous values and difficult to note the 
 relation of value between tones separated from each 
 other by a considerable angle at the observer's eye. 
 It requires an impressionist to feel the connection 
 between such values with anything like the sensation 
 of certitude with which one feels the harmony of 
 a chord. That is to say, it requires one whose 
 faculty it is to conceive of all the spots and mark- 
 ings of a scene only in some relation to its whole 
 aspect. The ensemble of a scene hypnotises and 
 fascinates an impressionist as if it were a real, 
 personal, and indivisible entity and not a mere sum 
 of small quantities. 
 
PABLILLOS DE VALLADOLID 
 also called a buffoon, an 
 Actor, and a Rhetor 
 
I 
 
HIS MODELLING AND BRUSHWORK 79 
 
 Breadth of view was Velasquez's most admirable 
 possession ; by it he made composition, modelling, 
 and style, the slaves of his impressions. This breadth 
 of view led him in his later pictures to vary his 
 manner of painting according to the sentiment of 
 his impression, so that you will find in his work no 
 pattern of brushwork, no settled degree of intimacy 
 in the modelling, no constantly equal force of realisa- 
 tion in edges, and, in short, no fixed habits or methods 
 of expression. In the comparison of " The Topers " 
 with " Las Meninas," it was pointed out that three 
 single heads which are just sufficiently broad in treat- 
 ment to look comfortable, would produce, if composed 
 in one frame, a pattern too crowded and spotty from 
 a decorative point of view. But such a compilation 
 of unmodified studies would sin also from an im- 
 pressionistic point of view. It would imply three 
 focuses of impression, and therefore whatever char- 
 acter each of the separate impressions might have 
 possessed would be jostled out of existence by the 
 others, and it would be impossible that there could 
 be any agreement of meaning between the aspect of 
 the picture and its technique. 
 
 To people who have never painted, such terms as 
 impressions, fields of vision, and angles of sight, may 
 seem fanciful, or at least irrelevant to art. An illus- 
 tration may help to show them that there is no absolute 
 realism of appearance, but that different eyes and 
 different habits of looking at the world would manifest 
 different qualities and different aspects of truth. When 
 a man reads, he does not focus individual letters but 
 takes in a whole line at a glance ; so that in ordinary 
 reading for pleasure he overlooks misspellings, reversed 
 
8o VELASQUEZ 
 
 letters, etc. On the other hand, a child reading letter 
 by letter, with a smaller field of impression, cannot 
 avoid seeing such mistakes. The large print used for 
 children is extremely fatiguing to grown people as 
 in order to see at one time the amount of letters 
 required to give them the current impression and 
 meaning of writing, they have to work over an un- 
 usually wide field of sight. If they hold these large 
 letters at a distance from the eye, proportionate to 
 their size, they will observe that the eye defines 
 differently, and altogether loses very fine strokes. It 
 is easy to apply this to painting, and it may serve 
 to show that what you look for you will see, let it 
 be a large thing and a continuous meaning, or small 
 things and a jerky interrupted meaning. 
 
 Many people must have noticed the occasional 
 effect of a portrait upon a blank canvas an effect of 
 grand importance, too often speedily impaired as the 
 painter proceeds to fill in the space. This blank 
 space happened to correspond roughly to the degree 
 of attention which the painter had accorded to sur- 
 roundings when he was painting the head ; its empti- 
 ness justified the closeness of his modelling and the 
 precision of his definitions. When he began to focus 
 elsewhere and to fill in accessories, the head began 
 to look mean and too tightly modelled. Velasquez's 
 most closely-studied heads are for the most part 
 isolated portraits, painted against utter blackness or 
 against an atmospheric grey or fawn tone of great 
 simplicity. Such are, for instance, " The Crucifixion " 
 (Prado, loss), and "Philip IV." (1080), in the same 
 gallery. Indeed, the black blankness surrounding " The 
 Crucifixion " alone saves its antique Bellini-like details 
 
THE CRUCIFIXION 
 
I 
 
HIS MODELLING AND BRUSHWORK 8i 
 
 of lettering and wood-graining from looking common- 
 place and topographical. As he became an impres- 
 sionist somewhat slowly, the qualities of modelling 
 which Velasquez always possessed appear to best 
 advantage in those early pictures which are simple 
 busts, as "Philip IV. in Armour" (Prado, 1071), and 
 not in those which are full-lengths, as "Philip IV." 
 (Prado, 1073), or the older full-length of Philip in 
 the National Gallery. In his later art, Velasquez 
 never painted a wide view as he would a narrow 
 one, nor a simple subject as a complicated one. When 
 he painted a wide angle of sight, he either concentrated 
 himself on a point, or steeped his whole canvas equally 
 in a soft envelope of light. Indeed, whatever he 
 painted, he always painted the quality of his atten- 
 tion to the scene, and, in virtue of that principle, his 
 best pictures never look spotty, and never tempt one 
 to cut them up into gem-like bits. His ensemble is 
 always equally easy to grasp, whether he paints great 
 groups like " Las Meninas " and " The Spinners," 
 solitary full-lengths like " Moenippus " and " ^Esop," 
 costume-portraits like "Maria Teresa" (Prado, 1084), 
 or simple busts like the head of Philip (Prado, 1080). 
 But if the art of all these pictures is based on the 
 same principles, and perhaps for that very reason, the 
 technique is very different in them all. You may 
 note a wonderful variety in Velasquez's style of 
 modelling a head, not only in different periods of his 
 life, but in pictures of the same period, and, what is 
 more, in heads on the same canvas. Some heads are 
 modelled very broadly and softly, without a sharp 
 mark, a hard edge, or small steep planes. The surface 
 slide into each other in a loose, supple manner, that 
 F 
 
82 VELASQUEZ 
 
 almost makes them look as if they were shaped in jelly 
 or fluid. Some consist of bold, rough-hewn planes 
 which give a face the force and vigour of firm chiselling. 
 Others, again, are completed to show the finest niceties 
 , of shape and inclination, with an intimacy of feeling and 
 \y^ a delicacy of proportion that no man has ever equalled. 
 The handling is always discreet and inspired by the 
 necessities of the occasion ; neither does it follow a 
 determined pattern, which might impart a frozen and 
 artificial look, nor does it seek an effect of bravura 
 dexterity which might arrogate an undue share of 
 attention and interest. Although no certain rule can 
 be laid down, generally speaking, Velasquez inclines 
 to brush in the obvious direction of the forms, so as 
 to supplement tone and structure by the sentiment 
 of the execution. In many cases, however, he smudges 
 so subtly as to convey no sense of direct handling. 
 The limb or object treated seems to grow mysteriously 
 out of dusky depths and to be shaped by real 
 light. 
 
 In the foregoing account of the art of Velasquez, 
 it has been contended that his impulse to arrange a 
 canvas grew out of the scene before his ^y^s ; that his 
 severe and stately colour is founded on nature, and 
 that his execution becomes quiet and exact, or burly 
 and impetuous, as the occasion demands. More than 
 any other man's, his work convinces us that he knew 
 what he saw and was incapable of self-deception ; it 
 is wholly free from haphazard passages, treacly ap- 
 proximations to tone, or clever tricks and processes 
 that evade rather than resolve a difficulty. Above all, 
 his art is interesting without the extravagance which 
 may kindle a momentary excitement, but is apt, like 
 
POPE INNOCENT X 
 
HIS MODELLING AND BRUSHWORK 83 
 
 a passionate mania for a woman, to die of satiety from 
 its very violence. The restrained force and dignity 
 of Velasquez inspire one with reverence and lasting 
 respect; one cannot easily fathom the depth of his 
 insight nor weary of his endless variety. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 NOTES ON SOME OF HIS PICTURES 
 
 A FEW pictures may be mentioned as examples ol 
 his differences of treatment at various times of his life 
 and in the service of various kinds of impression. 
 "Philip IV." (Prado, 1080) may be noted for the 
 sweet finesse of the modelling, the lovely black of the 
 clothes, and a command of colour in close ranges so 
 supreme that the local tints of the flesh are preserved^ 
 and cannot anywhere be confounded with the sof^ 
 iridescence of the luminous envelope. I scarcely 
 noticed this canvas at first, but its unobtrusive thor- 
 oughness gained ground every day, and at last its 
 silvery light fascinated me even more than the more 
 striking illuminations of "The Spinners," "^sop," orj 
 "Moenippus." It is smoother and more polished id 
 surface than these pictures, making, indeed, quite a 
 contrast to the particularly rough " ^sop " near it j 
 so that it has acquired a greener, mellower, and mor^ 
 varnished look, which adds to its appearance of exJ 
 treme delicacy. One feels that this portrait of Philipl 
 goes beyond human powers in the intimacy of its! 
 modelling. It seems to challenge nature in finish, andl 
 one almost resents that art and nature should both! 
 triumph to this extent on the same canvas. Per-i 
 haps the more visionary modelling of the head in 
 
 84 ! 
 
I 
 
 NOTES ON SOME OF HIS PICTURES 85 
 
 "Moenippus," the grand unashamed bravura of 
 "iEsop," the looser, broader execution of the faces 
 in " Las Meninas," " The Spinners," and the " Maria 
 Teresa," may be more impressively magisterial, because 
 more artistic, or, if you will, more artificial. The 
 modelling of these pictures challenges less arrogantly 
 the test of absolute truth. But it must be remembered 
 that in the larger canvases the modelling is modified 
 in style to suit different impressions and the con- 
 vention of a wider view. This Philip in the Prado, 
 like that in the National Gallery, only with less acces- 
 sory, is a mere bust shown against simple gloom. Its 
 extreme precision, and the close accuracy with which 
 every refinement of plane and every delicacy of flesh 
 tint is rendered, are therefore justified, since the head, 
 freed from distracting clamour of rival interests, alone 
 occupies the eye and fixes the attention. It is possible 
 to keep a tighter grip on the definitions, and, as it 
 were, to screw the eye closer down to the forms than 
 would be comfortable or natural in a wider or more 
 complex subject. 
 
 Velasquez looks at a full-length or a portrait with 
 accessories in quite a different mood. " The Eques- 
 trian Philip " of his middle period he touches in sum- 
 marily with fresh aerial colour, squarely spread by 
 large brush-strokes. The eye glances over the head, 
 taking in character as it would in the open air, 
 without a too nice discrimination of varieties in flesh 
 tint. " Martinez Montaii^s " reminds one of a Carolus- 
 Duran, with its bold planes as firm as if sculptured ; 
 while in " Maria Teresa," on the other hand, the face 
 looks soft and smooth owing to concealed flat model- 
 ling, and the head seems comparatively of small 
 
86 VELASQUEZ 
 
 account, like that of a Greek statue. This quietude 
 doubtless justifies itself by the exceeding brilliancy of 
 the dress-painting, which captures so much of the 
 attention. 
 
 The full lengths, "^Esop" and " Moenippus," differ 
 no less from each other in workmanship than from 
 the foregoing. "iEsop," the most cleverly-handled of 
 all Velasquez's heads, is the one that most supports 
 the legend of his swaggering dexterity in flourishing 
 a paintbrush. It is a rough impasto woven into a 
 most marvellously expressive texture, which is un- 
 fortunately quite unreproducible in illustrations. 
 " Moenippus," again, is painted in large overlapping 
 smears, very softly but very broadly, so that nothing 
 specially arrests the eye, which floats over a face, 
 figure, and accessories all bathed in liquid depths of 
 air. In " Las Meninas " you take in a populous area, 
 you embrace a vast field of vision, a wide view, in 
 fact, which demands and certainly receives the highest 
 art of impressionistic treatment. Velasquez has 
 centred the vision instead of spreading it equally over 
 the field as Corot has done in many of his canvases. 
 Yet this is contrived with so much art, that the careless 
 might not recognise "Las Meninas" as a work done 
 on the same principle as some of those so-called 
 eccentric pictures of recent impressionists. 
 
 Everyone will recall compositions in which a near 
 figure, chair, table, or stretch of foreground, appears 
 an enlarged and dislocated spectre, extravagantly 
 membered of meaningless and accidental blotches. 
 But these splashes obey a logical principle, although 
 they may too often defeat their purpose by their 
 infelicitous quaintness. The mind glides past these 
 
AESOPUS 
 
NOTES ON SOME OF HIS PICTURES 87 
 
 ghosts of objects unless they are made too strange ; 
 hence they should not fix the eye, but should play 
 loosely in a free medium, and should carry with them 
 no sharpness of definition, no small varieties of patch, 
 no modelled detail. In comparison with other parts 
 of the picture, they should have no attractive power 
 over the eye, and yet they should come forward and 
 stand in their right place. Now, after some study 
 you will find in " Las Meninas " this same art of dis- 
 tributing the attention. Wide as it is, one looks at 
 it easily as a whole, and at every subdivision as an 
 inseparable part of a scheme. The central Infanta, 
 by the force of light, by the surrounding definitions, 
 by the arrangement of the figures, by the strong 
 opposition of the open door and by the character of 
 the modelling, always holds the key of the situation. 
 But this is not all, for the Dwarf closer to you on the 
 right, as well as Velasquez farther off on the left, are 
 by no means modelled in the same style as the Infanta. 
 The Dwarf looks more diffused in definition and rather 
 resembles the head of " Moenippus " in its large loose- 
 ness and its floating vagueness. This head, which is 
 well to the side of the canvas, yet nearer to you than 
 the Infanta, is worked with greater amplitude of model- 
 ling than the central figures, and with a less concen- 
 trated style and a more swimming touch. But there 
 is no shocking distinction of brushwork in the picture, 
 no perplexing splashes that detain a questioning mind 
 even if they allow the eye to pass. At first sight all 
 appears brushed with the same insidious naturalness 
 of manner. Indeed, it is rather by subtlety of definition 
 and the varying treatment of planes at their junctures, 
 that the various interests of the picture are governed 
 
88 VELASQUEZ 
 
 and subordinated. In the modern picture the trick is 
 often too readily perceived and so appears unnatural. 
 In "Las Meninas" the eye is gratified unconsciously 
 by this artifice and the impression of unity is made 
 almost overwhelming, although the means used in no 
 way intrude themselves, and you would swear that all 
 was executed in the same style and by no subtler 
 magic than a reflection in a mirror. 
 
 In the busier, richer, and more accentuated canvas 
 of "The Spinners," the shadowed left half acts as a 
 foil to the right, and in its treatment we feel the 
 master even more perhaps than in the lively right half 
 which contains the heroic figure of the spinning girl. 
 It is because this left half is complete and dignified yet 
 not obtrusive that we admire the art with which it has 
 been organised. True, it contains about as strong local 
 colour as Velasquez ever painted, but the tints sleep 
 in a rich, penumbra which serves to set off the highly- 
 illuminated figure on the right. In this comparatively 
 tranquil side of the picture, the spindle, the stool, the 
 floor and the objects on it as well as the draped and 
 shadowed figures, seem to quiver in a warm haze 
 silvered with cool glints of light. Here Velasquez has 
 reached the top point of telling suggestion, of choice 
 touch, of nuanced softness, of comparative definition, 
 and of courageous slashing force in the right place. 
 But these two marvels do not quarrel ; this rich cir- 
 cumambiance of populous shadow and this dazzling 
 creature emerging from shadowiness with the gesture 
 of a goddess, set each other off and enhance each 
 other's fascinations. Is not the magic of her ex- 
 quisitely-turned head, and the magnificence of her 
 sweeping gesture due, in part at least, to the natural 
 
NOTES ON SOME OF HIS PICTURES 89 
 
 mystery with which the stray curls, the shining arm, 
 the modelled neck and body slide into the marvellous 
 shadow in the angle of the room? The cool light, 
 slightly greened now, which pervades " The Spinners," 
 comes to its culmination on this figure, and one should 
 not overlook the painter's nice discrimination between 
 the force of definitions in the passages from light to 
 dark of the girl's chemise. The immense breadth of 
 the surroundings, the fluid looseness of the inferior 
 markings in "The Spinners" helps to make the girl 
 more really divine than the neighbouring Virgin by 
 Murillo. In spite of her crescent moon, her cherubs, 
 her pillowy clouds, and other religious paraphernalia, 
 she is but a pretty ordinary girl whose hands, mouth, 
 and hair are softly but cheaply modelled, in comparison 
 to those of a figure by Velasquez. 
 
 In the octagon room close to "The Spinners" hangs 
 the costume -picture " Maria Teresa," which Justi 
 believes to be a portrait of the "Princess Margaret," 
 the Infanta of "Las Meninas." She stands directly 
 facing the light in a wonderfully elaborate balloon 
 dress, embroidered with a complicated pattern of silver 
 and pink and gleaming jewellery. In one hand she 
 holds a rose, in the other a lace handkerchief, and on 
 the left behind her in the shadow a red curtain droops 
 in heavy folds. No pupil touched the smallest acces- 
 sory of this extraordinary costume; lace, ruffles, 
 embroidery, every inch of the dress is painted by 
 Velasquez, with a running slippery touch which appears 
 careless near at hand, but which at the focus gives 
 colour, pattern, sparkle, and underlying form with the 
 utmost precision and completeness. The shadow 
 behind the figure is aerial in quality, deep but not 
 
90 VELASQUEZ 
 
 heavy, and silvered like the passages in light, so that 
 black would tell upon it as a rude brutality of tone. 
 Near "Maria Teresa," you may see work of many 
 kinds ; the beginnings of paint in a Van Eyck, con- 
 temporary art in the Murillo, and not far off A. Moro's 
 "Mary Tudor," painted for Philip II. Then there is 
 "David Rycksert," Van*Dyck's dark portrait of a man 
 in a fur-lined robe, very finely and frankly painted, 
 although without the finesse of the " Maria Teresa." 
 Rembrandt's "Artemisia" may not rank among his 
 good paintings, and certainly its gloom is heavy and 
 its transitions from shadow to light are harsh in com- 
 parison to similar passages in the work of Velasquez. 
 Examination of these pictures and others will help to 
 show the infinite delicacy which Velasquez attained 
 in the art of modelling, for beside his " Maria Teresa " 
 all other pictures seem to lack the subtlety of real 
 light. 
 
 It is instructive to compare the treatment of the 
 dresses in " Maria Teresa " and in " Las Meninas." 
 The dress of the single portrait sparkles all over with 
 vivacities of touch, but the broad, flatter treatment of 
 the dress in the larger group better agrees with a 
 rendering of attention spread over a wide view. Owing 
 to this sensitive feeling for the whole impression, " Las 
 Meninas," spread out as it is and full of strong points, 
 never tires the eye and never appears uncomfortably 
 crowded. Its detail nowhere intrudes unduly and 
 nowhere suggests a rival impression to the main one. 
 In fact, it is no more cut up proportionately than the 
 single portrait, although it embraces many more figures. 
 It was, however, this dashing, rippling execution of 
 "Maria Teresa" that chiefly struck the pupils of 
 

 I 
 
 MARIA TERESA 
 
NOTES ON SOME OF HIS PICTURES 91 
 
 Velasquez, and one can see very good imitations of it 
 in the work of his son-in-law, J. B. del Mazo. Perhaps 
 solider, simpler work would have been more usefully 
 studied. Many painters in the present century have 
 been taken rather with the master's subordination of 
 detail and his breadth of modelling, than with his 
 dexterity in brushwork. 
 
 In all the best canvases of Velasquez, you will find 
 
 the accessories vitalised by just degrees of force instead 
 
 of being killed by an equal realisation all over the 
 
 canvas. So it is in the " Moenippus," the " ^Esop," and 
 
 the Dwarf with a dog called "Antonio el Inglese." 
 
 The workmanship of this last a little resembles that of 
 
 "Maria Teresa" in its vivacious expression of detail 
 
 with a flowing brush. The ornaments of the dress, the 
 
 I hat and feather, and the dog itself, are all given with 
 
 fa gusto that never seems to interfere with true drawing 
 
 and broad modelling. The handling of " JEsop " is 
 
 graver and more stately, but everything here is also 
 
 in its right place and of the right force, down to the 
 
 subdued finish and elegant accuracy of the light on 
 
 the water on the bucket. One cannot help feeling 
 
 that Manet, the painter of " Le bon Bock," and other 
 
 magnificently painted heads, must have felt in close 
 
 ^sympathy with the handling of the face in ** JEsop " 
 
 f Again, when one looks at the "Sculptor Montafi^s," 
 
 one thinks of Carolus-Duran ; of the Whistler of " Lady 
 
 t Archibald Campbell " when one sees " Moenippus " ; 
 
 [and of the Sargent who painted "Mrs Hammersley" 
 
 [and " El Jaleo," when one stands before " Maria Teresa" 
 
 |and " The Spinners." 
 
 In fact, when we look back upon the variety of all 
 [these pictures, we are convinced that Velasquez never 
 
92 VELASQUEZ 
 
 used style for its own sake. Whether you look at a 
 point of his composition, colouring, modelling, or 
 handling, it appears always to have been decided by 
 the aspect of each picture and not by preconceived 
 principles. His composition is never a pattern forced 
 upon nature, his drawing is not an effort to realise 
 abstract contours, his colour is not the harmony of 
 positive tints understood by a milliner, his brush 
 changes with his impressions, as the tones of a man's 
 voice with his emotions. 
 
 Thus in "Philip IV." (Prado, 1080), no brushwork 
 is visible as befits an almost perfect attempt at the 
 illusion of light. This smoothness, however, has 
 no kinship with the polish of Raphael, which was a 
 mannerism applied to everything. The earlier " Forge 
 of Vulcan" shows a more evident workmanship, no- 
 where rough or sweeping, though you may note several 
 instances of brushing across the shape of the limb, 
 for Velasquez was never pedantic in his use of prin- 
 ciples. " The Spinners " may be quoted as an example 
 of the painter's art of touching accessories broadly, 
 and in this connection one should look also at the 
 slashing lights on the horse in the "Equestrian 
 Olivares." The " Sculptor Montan^s," the best portrait 
 of the middle period, forestalls modern logicality of 
 treatment ; one may note the bold certainty with 
 which Velasquez establishes the form of the eye 
 socket, the planes of the nose and cheeks in this 
 broad and stately portrait. No lines are wanted to 
 bring out the shapes ; the painter's science of values 
 is all-sufficient. Even in "Maria Teresa," which is 
 a miracle of dexterous touch, the handling is obedient 
 to fact and expresses matter before manner. The 
 
Q 
 < 
 
 
NOTES ON SOME OF HIS PICTURES 93 
 
 large, soft style of brushing used in " Moenippus," 
 "Las Meninas," etc., may be seen on a smaller scale 
 in the "Philip IV. Old," of the National Gallery. 
 Lastly, the management of trees by Velasquez, in his 
 later period, as in "The Avenue" (Prado, mo), may 
 be compared in beauty, even to the work of Corot. 
 He has felt to the full the soft, bowery umbrageous- 
 ness of trees, and has seen that for the most part 
 they cut against the sky with a blurred, vaporous 
 line. As a tree is deep as well as broad, it can 
 seldom relieve as a jagged line against a background ; 
 and as leaves are very small, and set one behind the 
 other, the saw-edge of the contour of detachment 
 becomes merely a line softened with such a burr as 
 you see in dry-point. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 HIS RELATION TO OLDER ART 
 
 To the eye of the historian, Velasquez may seem to 
 grow out of the main stem of art ; he may appear to 
 have his place in the orderly development of the 
 history of painting. To the eye of the sympathetic 
 modern painter, he seems an explosion of personality 
 as disconnected with the art that immediately followed 
 him as with that which preceded him. I believe that 
 the expert in mannerisms has tried to fix his measur- 
 ing apparatus upon the pictures of Velasquez, but to no 
 good purpose. The counting of curls, the measuring 
 of thumbs, the tracing of poses, may reveal something 
 when applied to men who learnt to draw and paint 
 formulas by rote, but must break down in the case 
 of a man with whom drawing is not a habit but an 
 art. \ Velasquez taught himself to picture the impres- 
 sion made by any sight upon his brain. This system 
 of training, which aims at improving the sight, at 
 cultivating a mood, at gaining a general faculty, has 
 banished the other system of learning a set of propor- 
 tions, a stock of patterns, a host of tips for drawing 
 separate limbs and other natural objects. Nothing 
 astonishes a modern painter more than to see a 
 historian ransack every gallery to find a precedent for 
 the style of a hand in a picture, rather than admit the 
 
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 THE DWARF "EL NINO 
 DE VALLECAS V 
 
HIS RELATION TO OLDER ART 95 
 
 possibility that an artist could choose one for himself 
 in the vast magazine of nature. Personal preference, 
 artistic impressionability, the counsel of a passing mood, 
 the testimony of a sensitive eye, are not these sufficient 
 reasons for the appearance of some given form in a 
 picture? Moreover, a picture cannot be the efficient, 
 the first cause of a picture ; all true art originates in 
 the personal predilections of an individual mind, and in 
 personal sensitiveness to external nature. The rest is 
 disguised copying, artistic or inartistic mannerism. 
 Now, of all painters, Velasquez was the one who 
 tampered least with the integrity of his impression of 
 the world. Every one of his pictures was a fresh 
 effort, less at finding a new and striking subject than 
 at realising more absolutely a way of seeing things 
 in general that was personal to him. Hence he never 
 tired of repetition, for the good reason that it was no 
 repetition to him in the sense that successive Madonnas 
 and saints were to the early Italians, who cooked them 
 out of receipts for thumbs, hair, draperies, ovals of 
 faces, noses and poses. 
 
 This makes the study of his work at Madrid as 
 trying as the study of some dozen old Italian masters. 
 
 Although during a too short visit to the Prado I 
 looked at the rest of the gallery only as a background 
 to the pictures of Velasquez, I cannot speak of him 
 without feeling a want of fuller knowledge and, above 
 all, of the advantage of having made one or two copies. 
 It was some consolation, after leaving Madrid, to hear 
 from the Scotch painter, Mr John Lavery, that he had 
 not found six months of study and careful copying 
 sufficient to settle his opinions on the pictures of 
 Velasquez. Upon his return in a following year, he 
 
96 VELASQUEZ 
 
 found unexpected beauties in some canvases, he looked 
 at others as if he had never seen them before, while 
 the copy that in Scotland had been to him and to 
 other painters the very interpretation of Velasquez, 
 now seemed lacking the essential spirit of the master. 
 Thus, whether one gives a week or a year to the 
 Prado, one comes back convinced that one cannot 
 have sounded all the depths of a man who never did 
 anything as a skilled automaton or a learned pedant. 
 Of course it is in the later canvases, in the works of 
 the last dozen years of his life, that Velasquez makes the 
 most marvellous use of paint. But the marvel is not of 
 the kind one looks for. In the large impressionistic, 
 canvases of his later life, one might expect to see the 
 bold, dexterous brusher surpassing even Ribera, Hals, 
 or the mature Rembrandt in the bravura of his handi- 
 work. On the contrary, as I have said, the paint at 
 first sight scarcely appears to be intentionally handled ; 
 it seems put on, I might say, without art, if that did not 
 give a false view ; for in truth it is put on with consum- 
 mate art in the interest of the whole canvas, and not for 
 the style of the passage itself Without flourish, for the 
 most part without even an appearance of brush strokes, 
 the paint is smeared in thin filmy scales which vary in 
 size, looseness, and breadth, with the necessities of the 
 subject and the composition. It is a style founded on 
 the pursuit of more than usually just and subtle model- 
 ling, a modelling which changes character with the size 
 of the canvas, with the width or narrowness of the field 
 of view, and with the position near or far from the focus 
 of impression of an object to be modelled. It is a style 
 compatible with revision and correction, for it in no way 
 depends upon the integrity of some arbitrary pattern of 
 
THE DWARF 
 SEBASTIAN DE MORRA 
 
HIS RELATION TO OLDER ART 97 
 
 touch, square, sweeping, or interwoven. This apparent 
 artlessness surprises one at first, but becomes in the end 
 a chief charm of the later Velasquez, who was too great, 
 too earnest, too far-seeing, to care for small affectations 
 of manner. In these pictures nothing seems to inter- 
 pose between you and the mind of Velasquez. You 
 seem to be behind his eye, able to judge and to feel, 
 with all the power and sensitiveness of that unrivalled 
 organ. In a word, his work resembles the fine writing 
 in which style is so docile a servant of matter, that it 
 never draws attention to itself; you read as you might 
 eat a meal in the Arabian Nights, served by invisible 
 hands. 
 
 In spite of the example of Velasquez, some modern 
 painters fear a close study of drawing, values, or model- 
 ling ; and through their timidity they leave an impres- 
 sion in a vague state, half-true, half-realised, a state of 
 fever or of sleepiness. Not nature, but the man*s impres- 
 sion of nature, should be complete and definite. Their 
 fear^of drawing and modelling is unfounded; in the 
 hands of Velasquez these accomplishments never be- 
 came mechanical, never degenerated from inspired 
 seeing to trained labour. Need we fear to advance 
 towards truth and accuracy, when he who adventured 
 farthest seems to encourage us by the grandeur and 
 surpassing sentiment that rewarded his devotion to the "^^^ "^ 
 
 Whilst looking at his pictures, one may remember 
 amongst his predecessors and the painters of his choice, 
 Caravaggio, Greco, Ribera, Sanchez Coello, and notably 
 Titian and Tintoretto. The spirit that animated Cara- 
 vaggio and Ribera may be seen in the solidity, real 
 form, and fine handling of "The Forge of Vulcan" 
 G 
 
 61 V 
 
98 VELASQUEZ 
 
 and " The Topers." In Greco you may see something 
 of the simplicity and sober colouring of his single 
 portraits, and in Coello a prophecy of his flesh colours 
 of grey ash quality and of his early accuracy in the 
 accessories of dress. 
 
 Greco is often spoken of as a man to whom Velasquez 
 was directly indebted for his style. While Greco cer- 
 tainly adopted a Spanish gravity of colouring, neither 
 that nor his modelling was ever subtle or thoroughly 
 natural. Yet in such portraits as Prado 243, 245, there 
 is more suppleness and breadth than Velasquez had 
 ever displayed up to the date of Greco's death at 
 Toledo in 1625. One of these examples of Greco's 
 work (No. 243) hangs just above the early Velasquez, 
 "Philip IV." (1071), and while one admits Greco's 
 superior freedom and ease of style, one perhaps admires 
 still more the inborn power of seeing shown by the 
 modelling of the mouth of this early Velasquez. While 
 Velasquez ripened with age and practice, Greco was 
 rather inclined to get rotten with facility. 
 
 Velasquez had opportunities of studying other painters 
 than Greco as soon as he became Court painter, and it 
 is known that his admiration was early turned to the 
 work of Venice. He often praised Titian's execution 
 as well as Tintoretto's rendering of light and the just 
 depth of space. On the authority of Boschini, Carl 
 Justi records a conversation between Salvator Rosa and 
 Velasquez, which throws some light on the Spaniard's 
 natural tastes. Salvator had asked whether after all 
 he had seen in Italy he did not think Raphael the best, 
 to which Velasquez replied, " Raphael, to be plain with 
 you, for I like to be candid and outspoken, does not 
 please me at all." Then Salvator said, " In that case, 
 
HIS RELATION TO OLDER ART 99 
 
 there can apparently be nobody to your taste in Italy, 
 for to him we yield the crown." And Velasquez 
 answered, "In Venice are found the good and the 
 beautiful ; to their brush I give the first place ; it is 
 Titian that bears the banner." Velasquez, indeed, must 
 have admired the breadth and envelopment of the 
 pictures of Titian, Tintoretto, Correggio, Veronese, and 
 certainly the style of such a portrait as the " Andrea 
 Odoni " by Lotto, which was exhibited in the New 
 Gallery, January 1895. On the other hand, he could 
 scarcely be expected to sympathise with the art of 
 Raphael ; and his outspokenness has been amply re- 
 paid in all ages by the frank dislike of all Raphaelites 
 for his own work. We could not wish artists other- 
 wise ; were they tepid to the beauties they see in the 
 world, they could arouse in us but a feeble response 
 to their works. Art without personal prejudice would 
 become an affair of science in which truth depends on 
 argument and not on personal convictions. Painting, 
 in that case, would be abandoned by artistic minds for 
 some field of enterprise which was unattainable by 
 mathematical processes, and which still offered free 
 elbow-room for the sport of the emotions and the play 
 of personality. 
 
 But before Velasquez saw Italy he must have seen 
 the superb portrait "Mary Tudor" (Prado, 1484), by 
 Antonio More. The lesson of a picture which is abso- 
 lutely sincere to the principle of sight of its author 
 cannot have been lost upon Velasquez. This portrait 
 stops everyone and communicates the shock of contact 
 with a real person. I say " shock " advisedly, for it is 
 over-modelled after the manner of those who have fine 
 eyes and are not impressionists. It betrays invincible 
 
loo VELASQUEZ 
 
 perseverance, care, and close perception, but it reveals 
 nothing magically like a late portrait by Velasquez. 
 Having seen it, you are done with it, and cannot hope 
 to find fresh beauties dawning on you each time you 
 return. The thing is too set, too tightly frozen into 
 definite lines in the features. Mary Tudor would never 
 have so looked to any one in her life. This determined 
 hunting down of every separate feature has ended in 
 something more rigid than flesh, something more like a 
 caricature than an impression, something more like a 
 diagram than the changeable reality of nature. It is a 
 record, perhaps, for the historian, not a revelation for 
 the poet. Yet beyond this ideal I scarcely think 
 Velasquez travelled until he was over thirty. It will 
 be remembered that the " Mary Tudor " hangs on the 
 same wall with the "Sculptor Montanes," "The Spinners," 
 and " Maria Teresa," by Velasquez. The comparison 
 here offered is worth making by any one who goes to 
 Madrid. 
 
 The power of seizing a speaking resemblance such 
 as we see in " Mary Tudor " has been always accorded 
 to Velasquez. It is a merit which cannot be denied 
 him as it was denied Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, and 
 other great painters who often executed a fantasia on 
 the motif of the person painted. Titian's "Francois 
 Premier " is shrewdly doubted on the score of likeness 
 in the present day, and Dutch burghers in the past 
 preferred Van der Heist to Rembrandt. It was in the 
 cause of beauty that these great artists sacrificed the 
 accurate map of the features that pleases family friends 
 and the profusion of hard accessories that ministers to 
 family pride. 
 
CRISTOBAL DE PERNIA 
 CALLED "BABARROJA" 
 
HIS RELATION TO OLDER ART loi 
 
 A painter may not with impunity take the free 
 generous style of Titian and Rembrandt and correct it 
 with a dose of the patient accuracy of tamer spirits. 
 Grandeur and carefulness will usually quarrel like a 
 medicine of ill-mixed ingredients in a patient's stomach. 
 Men who have been as conscientiously truthful as 
 Velasquez have painted worse than he has and have 
 not attained the same kind of truth. The intimacy 
 which is so much admired in Velasquez was not arrived 
 at by deliberate eclecticism, but by the inspiration of 
 a genius for seeing things freshly. He learnt to see 
 differently from Antonio More, to care for larger truths ; 
 and it was this fine imaginative seeing that gave a 
 charm to the world in his eyes and prompted his brush 
 to nobler fashions of expression. For what great thing 
 can be done in art with only patience, method, and 
 accuracy of eye? Those who have tried and failed, 
 but who take heart to understand the success of great 
 men, know that mere trouble only ends in elaboration 
 of the part and disorganisation of the whole ; at best 
 in the dull topographical chart of the features which 
 misses the divine enchantment of the finest art. Yet 
 one may search through the Prado in vain to find 
 any portrait, outside of the work of Velasquez, more 
 thoroughly studied than " Mary Tudor," more evidently 
 the report of a trustworthy eye. " L'homme au gant," 
 or the still finer " Young Man unknown " by Titian in 
 the Louvre, not to speak of "Titian's Mistress," are i/^ 
 incomparably more beautiful art than "Mary Tudor"; 
 they are less intimate, however. It is only Velasquez 
 who is as penetrating as More, as poetical and artistic 
 \ as Titian. " Titian's Mistress," it is not possible to 
 
102 VELASQUEZ 
 
 imagine even Velasquez able to better, but one feels 
 that he, and perhaps he alone, could have corrected a 
 certain hardness in the modelling of " L'homme au 
 gant," and an unwise precision in certain lines of the 
 glove, hair, etc. 
 
MARIANA DE AUSTRIA 
 SECOND WIFE OF PHILIP IV 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 HIS INFLUENCE UPON RECENT ART 
 
 To see the Prado is to modify one's opinion of the 
 novelty of recent art. Landscape and landscape with 
 figure may be more independent of the past, but figure 
 painting certainly owes much to Velasquez. Whether 
 directly or indirectly, whether consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, artists have decided after half- a -century of 
 exploration to follow the path of Velasquez. Not that 
 they have plagiarised, but that in the natural growth of 
 ideas, the seed of thought has been blown from Spain 
 to every part of the world. The process, however, was 
 a slow one. Writers on Velasquez have been few ; in 
 the past Pacheco, the master and father-in-law of 
 Velasquez, and Palomino, painter to Philip V. ; in the 
 present century Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, Richard Ford, 
 T. Thor6, Carl Justi, and one or two others. But writing 
 can do nothing to help art, unless like a sign-post it 
 makes painters aware of the road to a certain kind of 
 art. They must walk it themselves, and we find that 
 those who saw and spoke enthusiastically of Velasquez 
 in the early portion of the century went little out of 
 their way to understand him. Sir David Wilkie pre- 
 ferred " The Topers " to the later work, and John Philip, 
 if he learnt anything from Velasquez, learnt from the 
 early pictures certain receipts in colouring and in hand- 
 103 
 
104 VELASQUEZ 
 
 ling a brush, but not the courage to work entirely 
 without receipts. 
 
 The return to nature of the French Romantics of 
 1 815 to 1855 was guided rather by the example of 
 Rubens, Rembrandt, Lawrence, and Constable, than 
 by that of Velasquez. A Gros, a Gericault, a Delacroix, 
 however vigorously painted, shows only a realism of 
 subject, of textures, of detail, of drawing, but never a 
 realism of general aspect that could approach the con- 
 vincing truth of the later impressionism of Velasquez. 
 It was in landscape with figure that France indepen- 
 dently worked out the principles of a new art, and 
 even Corot seems to hold one hand to the Romantics, 
 and the other to the schools of 1865-95. The names 
 of Courbet, Manet, Carolus-Duran, Whistler, Henner, 
 will occur to everyone as characteristic of the departure 
 of the present movement in art. Without doubt, Bonnat, 
 E, Delaunay, A. Legros, and others have revived our 
 interest in style, our assiduity in modelling, but after 
 fashions less particular to our own age. I am more 
 acquainted with M. Carolus-Duran's views and system 
 than with those of others, and I think that he differs 
 from French Romantics much as Velasquez differed 
 from Rubens and Rembrandt. 
 
 Duran set himself to teach art less on the venerable 
 principles of outline drawing than on a method adapted 
 to his own fashion of looking at nature by masses and 
 by constructive planes. Of course, Duran taught draw- 
 ing, but likely enough his method was not suitable to 
 every kind of talent, for he separated drawing from 
 modelling with the brush as little as possible. Accord- 
 ing to him the whole art of expressing form should 
 progress together and should consist in expressing it,~ 
 
HIS INFLUENCE UPON RECENT ART 105 
 
 as we see it, by light. He regarded drawing as the art 
 of placing things rightly in depth as well as in length 
 and breadth ; and for this purpose he would call atten- 
 tion to various aspects of form the intersection and 
 prolongation of imaginary lines, the shape of inclosed 
 spaces, the interior contents of masses, the inclination of 
 planes to light, and the expression or characteristic 
 tendency of any visible markings. 
 
 Very far back in history there was probably a sort 
 of folk-drawing as there was folk-music consisting of 
 conventions for expressing individual objects to be 
 learnt by rote as we learn the shapes of the countries 
 from an atlas. Then came the stage of canons of 
 proportion as we find them still discussed by Diirer 
 and Leonardo in their attempts to formalise the vague 
 traditions of the past. From this we pass in the books 
 of that same Leonardo to the third stage based on the 
 sciences of perspective and anatomy. Relics of the 
 first two stages are still to be found amongst school- 
 boys who hand down " tips " for drawing men and 
 objects, and never dream of going to look at any 
 object for themselves. "Show me how to draw a 
 man," or " I haven't learnt how one does a pig yet," 
 are phrases commonly heard amongst that kind of 
 practitioner. This rule of thumb tradition grows from 
 various sources, stray personal memories or observa- 
 tions, and fragmentary recollections of the work of 
 such schools of first-hand study from nature as the 
 Greek and Assyrian. The sciences in their turn 
 were very useful to those who would group figures 
 from chic, cultivate improvement of type, and intro- 
 duce tumbled and floating figures into great ceiling 
 decorations. 
 
 V 
 
io6 VELASQUEZ 
 
 As in Greece, so in later Europe, it was portraiture 
 that kept art sincere and vital. But in spite of that 
 influence, figure subjects remained long in the con- 
 ventional stage. Leonardo's constant appeal to nature 
 was not the mere commonplace saw that it is to-day. 
 He found it necessary to enforce his view on every 
 point ; on drawing, on perspective, on chiaroscuro, on 
 the value of colours at various distances, on the art 
 of modelling, which he describes as too often con- 
 sisting of an arbitrary passage from dark to light by 
 the use of two or three stock tones brushed together. 
 
 Is it wonderful that you can apply Morelli's principles 
 of criticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Italian schools : that 
 you can point to the thumbs, fingers, poses of the 
 head, ovals of the face, and schemes of colour that 
 the painters learnt by heart, and can even say from 
 whom they learnt? The later Venetians broke away, 
 and when you come to Velasquez, the system holds 
 good as little as it can in our own day. Velasquez 
 taught his eye so to report sight that he could render 
 the familiar or the unfamiliar, and could communicate 
 directly with what was before him without the inter- 
 vention of traditional rules or scientific study. His 
 name was for ever in the mouth of Carolus-Duran, 
 when he spoke of the past, but it was not to induce 
 his students to copy even Velasquez. For instance, 
 the influence of Corot was great at that time, and 
 I have heard Duran say, *'When you go into the 
 fields you will not see a Corot ; paint what you see." 
 He wished to direct their education so that his pupils 
 might attack nature from whatever side they pleased. 
 The prerogative of grasping what is before you does 
 not preclude you from afterwards learning to do with- 
 
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 THE DWARF CALLED 
 "ANTONIO EL IN'GLESS 
 
HIS INFLUENCE UPON RECENT ART 107 
 
 out the model, and to paint what you imagine instead 
 of what you see, but it provides you a perpetual 
 stronghold in case of defeat, and a base of operations 
 for future excursions into the unknown. 
 
 In his " Manual of Oil Painting," the Hon. John 
 Collier says, "To whatever use he may mean to put 
 his art eventually, the one thing that he has to learn, 
 as a student, is how to represent faithfully any object 
 that he has before him," and in another place, " there 
 is nothing so deadening to the imagination as to try 
 to express it with inadequate means." Velasquez, by 
 the admission of all the artists in Rome, alone painted 
 reality, the others, some decorative convention. When, 
 in the present century, truth of impression became the 
 governing ideal of art, Velasquez became the prophet 
 of the new schools. At that time in France, any 
 coterie of young painters hired a studio, and chose 
 for themselves the master whose art promised them 
 guidance in a sympathetic path. Having themselves 
 chosen the direction, the students were all the more 
 likely to bear with the weariness and the obstacles 
 of the road. For those who had asked his aid, Carolus- 
 Duran formulated the principles of his own art, and 
 enforced them by an appeal to the practice of others 
 and, before all, of Velasquez. 
 
 By his method of teaching, he hoped at least to 
 give the student a knowledge of what he saw, and 
 a logical grasp of the principles of sight. After a 
 slight search of proportions with charcoal, the places 
 of masses were indicated with a rigger dipped in flow- 
 ing pigment. No preparation in colour or monochrome 
 was allowed, but the main planes of the face must 
 be laid directly on the unprepared canvas with a 
 
 / 
 
io8 VELASQUEZ 
 
 broad brush. These few surfaces three or four in 
 the forehead, as many in the nose, and so forth 
 must be studied in shape and place, and particularly 
 in the relative value of light that their various inclina- 
 tions produce. They were painted quite broadly in 
 even tones of flesh tint, and stood side by side like 
 pieces of a mosaic, without fusion of their adjacent 
 edges. No brushing of the edge of the hair into the 
 face was permitted, no conventional bounding of eyes 
 and features with lines that might deceive the student 
 by their expression into the belief that false structure 
 was ' truthful. In the next stage you were bound to 
 proceed in the same manner by laying planes upon 
 the junctions of the larger ones or by breaking the 
 larger planes into smaller subordinate surfaces. You 
 were never allowed to brush one surface into another, 
 you must make a tone for each step of a gradation. 
 Thus, you might never attempt to realise a tone or 
 a passage by some hazardous uncontrollable process. 
 
 M. Carolus-Duran believed that if you do not 
 approach tone by direct painting you will never know 
 what you can do, and will never discover whether you 
 really feel any given relation, or the values of any 
 contrasting surfaces. The first stages of this work 
 looked like portraits of wooden figures cut with a knife 
 in sharp-edged, unsoftened facets. The effect on the 
 Ruskinian of this hideous and pitiless logic was terrible. 
 Most of them sickened at the strong medicine, and fled 
 from the too heroic cure for the namby-pamby model- 
 ling which trusts for expression to a red line between 
 the lips, a contour line to the nose, and a careful rigger 
 track round the eyes and eyebrows. I have felt the 
 first spasms of this disgust, and I praise the master 
 
HIS INFLUENCE UPON RECENT ART 109 
 
 who stayed, not the pupil who fled. If Duran was not 
 squeamish at criticising and touching these awful dolls, 
 why should the pupil take pride in the weakness of his 
 stomach. Duran had little patience with the aesthete 
 and conventional sentimentalist, and nothing amused 
 him more than the "loss of my originality," a plea 
 often put forward by men still blind to the ordinary 
 aspect of nature. He was pitiless to the transparent 
 colour dodge, the badger-hair hypocrisy, and the hope- 
 ful haphazard glazings of the sentimentalist who 
 cannot shape a nose, and would show all Browning's 
 works in a face. 
 
 This severe system, it must be remembered, served 
 merely as the gymnastic of art, it was a means of 
 education for the eye, not a trick of mannerism, or a 
 ready-made style of painting. Had not Duran's studio 
 been already described, I believe in the Nineteenth 
 Century^ I should have said more of the teaching of 
 a great painter whose only recognised master was 
 Velasquez. There is, however, one point that I must 
 mention, as it throws a light on the simplicity of 
 Velasquez's flesh tints and the surprising subtlety and 
 clearness of his modelling of shape. Everyone knows 
 that insubordination of the eye or that false estimation 
 of comparative importances in nature which led some 
 painters to exaggerate spots of local colour, definitions 
 of detail, reflected lights, or, in fact, anything dangerous 
 to the peace of the ensemble. They so treated the skin, 
 as to embarrass modelling, which is the first quality 
 in a face, for the sake of accidental spots, which are of 
 little count in that most even and luminous of sub- 
 stances, flesh. 
 
 If you will paint the trivial and the uncharacteristic, 
 
no VELASQUEZ 
 
 your picture must be commonplace; for what affects 
 us in a picture is that for which it was painted, the 
 things, in fact, for which the aspect of the canvas was 
 designed. It is not sujfficient to put things into a work 
 of art, it is necessary to see that they look out from 
 it perspicuously and with the greatest possible effect. 
 A certain pattern, a certain shape, may be somewhere 
 on a canvas, but it may lie there as well hid as the 
 secret of a puzzle picture. The person who never sees 
 anything particular to look at in a scene, alone thinks 
 he can show everything to equal advantage by a labour 
 of addition. The man with only a sense of decoration 
 is saved this last humiliation of mistaking trouble for 
 feeling, counting for being impressed, and measuring 
 for seeing. He knows that every extra marking on a 
 canvas increases the danger that a design may be 
 choked and modelling buried in a welter of dots or 
 a labyrinth of subordinate pattern. The English 
 stipple of colours, chiefly seen about the eyes, ears, 
 and the edges of shadows, always drew from Duran 
 his famous " Pourquoi ces trente six mille couleurs." 
 We saw them, of course, not in nature, but in our 
 memories of the cadmium, lake, green, and blue spots 
 of the English pictures of that date. It was an easy 
 task to seize on the excuse for these coloured spots, 
 a difficult one to embrace the relations of the ensemble 
 that reduced them to their true insignificance. The 
 ornaments of an exaggerated colouring may be com- 
 pared to the graces of rhyme in an accented language, 
 such as English. Dignity stumbles over these recur- 
 rent obstacles, and if the sense skips them cleverly, 
 it is at the expense of earnestness and reality. 
 
 The sight of Velasquez at Madrid does not make 
 
PHILIP IV (OLD) 
 
HIS INFLUENCE UPON RECENT ART iii 
 
 us look upon the works of Regnault, Courbet, Manet, 
 Carolus-Duran, Monet, Henner, Whistler, Degas, 
 Sargent, and the rest, as plagiary. It rather gives 
 the man of our century confidence that he is following 
 a path not unlike that trod to such good purpose by 
 the great Spaniard. To reach the goal of impres- 
 sionism cost Velasquez thirty years of exploration, and 
 then it was gained only for the expression of his own 
 views. Velasquez, except in his few landscapes, never 
 applied his principles to the thorough realisation of 
 plein-air effects. Thus, the path pursued by men of 
 the present century, though by no means identical, 
 passes through similar stages and progressions. De- 
 corative formulas, and the successive realism of various 
 separate qualities subject, form, colour, and atmos- 
 phere bestrew the path from Gros to Manet, just as 
 they mark the stages in the development of the solitary 
 Velasquez. 
 
 Corot and Millet took his principles into the open 
 air; the first painting landscape with figures, the 
 second figures with landscapes. Of these Corot was 
 the purest impressionist, Millet hanging more evidently 
 on the chain of Romantics from Michael Angelo and 
 Rembrandt to his own Barbizonian school. Regnault, 
 especially in the face of his " Marshal Prim," shows a 
 fellow-feeling with Velasquez in his second period of 
 the great equestrian portraits. Duran avoided bright 
 coloured subjects less than Velasquez, and reduced his 
 handling to a more formal and logical pattern. 
 Henner, half a Classic and half a Romantic by nature, 
 took up the nude and worked it on more distinctly 
 decorative motifs of colour, and on a softer but less 
 subtle principle of modelling. Whistler combined a 
 
112 VELASQUEZ 
 
 morbid Japanese grace with the Spanish austerity of 
 impression, and saw things with a raffine's attraction to 
 elegance, and the quintessence of modishness. In 
 " The Nocturnes," in " The Japaneseries," in " Miss 
 Alexander," in the portrait of his mother, he breaks 
 away into a game of his own. If not more original 
 than others, Manet was perhaps the strongest and 
 widest in his originality of all the revivers of impres- 
 sionism. He is as various in his moods as daylight, 
 and, except in one or two heads, such as "Le Bon 
 Bock," shows nothing of his long study of Velasquez, 
 unless in the underlying convention common to all 
 impressionists. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE LESSON OF IMPRESSIONISM 
 
 The more one sees of artists, the more one learns of 
 their dependence on the model ; the more one sees 
 them eager to study the thing painted. But they apply 
 to nature for different purposes, for anatomy, for surface 
 character, for colour, for details, for movements, for 
 values, for an impression of effect, for arrangements .to_ 
 fill a given space. Great painters of all schools from 
 Leonardo to Whistler have so often acknowledged 
 nature as the mistress that the admission becomes a 
 truism were it not capable of being understood in so 
 many different ways. It is a fresh reading of this 
 precept that makes a new art ; other considerations 
 then become means to an end. Composition, colour, 
 brushing, etc., receive a new consideration. Their 
 effectiveness and their possibilities of style are over- 
 hauled and esteemed according as they can forward the 
 expression of the central conception of natural beauty. 
 
 Carducho, a colleague of Velasquez, waged war 
 against the influence of naturalism in art, exalting 
 traditional and learned painting above sensitiveness to 
 nature. But Michael Angelo, a fountain of learning 
 and a head source of idealism, rose from the bowels of 
 nature, springing, it is true, from another soil than 
 Velasquez, from the objective 'rather than the subjective 
 H 113 
 
114 VELASQUEZ 
 
 position. He grubbed into the depths of anatomy and 
 studied nature as it was, concerning himself com- 
 paratively little with its aspect to the eye or its relation 
 to the nerves of vision. To the learned decorator it 
 seemed but a trivial thing to catch the flavour of life 
 whilst filling a panel, to recreate in the subtle structures 
 of the eye vibrations of a long hereditary past, and to 
 recommend a present sentiment to the spectator's old 
 habits of visual emotion. However, as we have seen in 
 the history of mathematical invention, a new calculus 
 is never to be counted useless. It is like the seeds 
 which they say lie everywhere in the soil ready to 
 sprout after fires or any favourable changes in the soil. 
 So naturalism has grown like a grain of mustard-seed 
 and the impressionism of Velasquez overshadows art. 
 The test of a new thing is not utility, which may appear 
 at any moment like a shoot with the first favouring 
 breath of spring. The test is the kind and amount of 
 human feeling and intellect put into the work. Could 
 any fool do it? Now, in this matter of depicting 
 truth there are eyesights of all grades of breadth, of 
 grandeur, of subtlety, and art has more than the 
 delicacy of a tripos examination in tailing out as 
 in a foot-race all the talents and capabilities of the 
 competitors. 
 
 The great idealist of Italy was admirable, but he is 
 dead, his work is done, and when it was doing it was 
 at least based on matter, on anatomy, on the laws of 
 decoration. There is a modern idealist whose whole 
 cause seems to be hatred of matter, of the truth, of the 
 visible, of the real, and a consequent craving for the 
 spiritual, the non-material. That this man should 
 choose painting or sculpture, the most material, the 
 
THE GOD MARS 
 
THE LESSON OF IMPRESSIONISM 115 
 
 most tied to representation of the arts seems indeed a 
 non-sense. 
 
 Yet one cannot help feeling some sympathy with 
 those who start on this hopeless cruise, who wreck the 
 ship whilst steering to some visionary island of spiritu- 
 alism. They are as those who dream of ideal love, 
 and yet forgive no shortcoming, and persistently despise 
 and misuse ordinary human affections, as those who 
 wish for a perfect society and cannot take pains to 
 understand their own day or their own country. This 
 temperament is ruinous to the artist. He neglects the 
 material base of art, despises drawing and modelling, 
 and sacrifices the conquest of nature as readily as a 
 faddist, the well-being of a great empire to his dreams. 
 The true artist's thought is of his material, of its 
 beauties, of its limitations, of its propriety to the task 
 proposed. He has to achieve beauty, but under con- 
 ditions of fact, of decoration, of a medium. It may 
 be seen in the work of Velasquez that there is no base 
 reality ; that the commonplace lies only in the method 
 of a mean, a small, and an inartistic eye. It was not 
 only his immediate subjects but the whole art of seeing 
 that Velasquez dignified in his paintings. 
 
 Leon Pelouse, the French landscape-painter, used 
 to say that the gift of the naturalist lay in the power 
 of recreating the eye of childhood. When the child 
 first sees before he can walk, before he can know 
 what all these coloured spots of various shapes and 
 strengths may mean he receives from a field of sight 
 an impression of the values of colour and the forces 
 of definition utterly unadulterated by knowledge of 
 distance, depth, shape, utility, and the commercial, 
 religious, or sexual importance of objects. Indeed, 
 
Ii6 VELASQUEZ 
 
 he is not biassed by that chief disturber of impression, 
 the knowledge that any objects exist ; in fact, he sees 
 men as trees walking. He sees patterns, and it takes 
 him years to know what these patterns, these changing 
 gradations, these varying smudges signify, and when 
 he has learnt that, in proportion as he has succeeded, 
 so he has ceased to know the original vision, and to 
 perceive mentally the signs by which he originally 
 determined the truth. 
 
 If the conventionality of an art that expresses three 
 dimensions by two was not enough to assure us, then 
 the foregoing statement must make it certain that the 
 modern painter should concern himself very much 
 about what seems, and scarcely at all about what is. 
 Yet people will tell you that it is just the impressionist 
 picture which looks strange to them, and the illogical 
 dictionary of small objects which looks natural. The 
 observation that a horse at a distance is not of the 
 same shape as a horse near at hand is at least as old as 
 Leonardo. He describes how the limbs disappear first, 
 the neck and head next, as the distance increases, until 
 you are aware only of an oblong or oval splash. But 
 practice lagged long behind theory, and there are 
 painters to-day, especially in England, who would not 
 paint the real appearance of an object at different dis- 
 tances. They are behind the scenes, as it were, and, 
 knowing that they are to produce a horse, they paint it 
 exactly as they have studied it near at hand, only they 
 make it small, like a toy, because it is far off. Some 
 hundreds of years ago they would have refused even 
 that concession to the then strange and novel art of 
 perspective. These toy boats on the sea, these toy 
 cows in the meadows, these toy soldiers in the battle- 
 
ST. ANTHONY VISITING ST. PAUL 
 
THE LESSON OF IMPRESSIONISM 117 
 
 field, are not big things seen far off, but little miniatures 
 near at hand, compelled by perspective to occupy a false 
 position on the canvas. 
 
 Many Royal Academy pictures, and the most popular 
 ones, are still full of these comic little dolls, which 
 pretend to realism of effect. Such rude compilations 
 of objects, studied at different focuses, are easily shown 
 to be logically defective, but it is less easy to perceive 
 the more subtle disaster incurred by a similar fault in 
 figure subjects, where everything takes place somewhat 
 close at hand. Comparison of the definitions and 
 gradations of a fine Velasquez with those of an ordinary 
 picture is, perhaps, the most ready way to perceive the 
 vulgarity of the cheap method which exaggerates out- 
 lines, and replaces tone and gradation by false explana- 
 tory definitjon. To draw a silly line in a mouth, eye, 
 or nose, where no line should be, merely because you 
 have been taught painting by means of chalk-drawing, 
 implies a gross violation of the lighting of a portrait, 
 just as putting toy boats and cows in the distance im- 
 plies a contradiction of perspective. 
 
 What is the harm, you may ask, of painting a picture 
 piecemeal, since it is on the flat, and may be viewed 
 from any distance? Cannot the canvas always be 
 easily embraced by the eye as a whole ? Quite so, and, 
 because it then fails to give a truthful impression of the 
 field it offers, it deceives expectation and violates the 
 confidence of the eye. The compilation of sketches, 
 or focuses of impression, induces false perspective, false 
 values, false colour, a false proportion of detail to mass, 
 and a combination of interests in false relation to the 
 interests of the whole picture. Velasquez may have 
 painted "Las Meninas" how he pleased, yet he kept 
 
ii8 VELASQUEZ 
 
 before himself a single impression of the scene, and 
 therefore he succeeds in conveying it to the spectator. 
 He may have studied each figure separately ; he may 
 have stood nearer to them in so doing than he makes 
 the spectator appear to stand, but, if so, his artistic 
 conviction of the true aspect of the ensemble was suffi- 
 ciently strong to prevent him from executing his picture 
 solely for the sake of each square yard he successively 
 tackled. How many pictures of the scope of " Las 
 Meninas," or "The Spinners," comfortably fill the eye 
 as they do, and absorb the attention so justly and evenly 
 all over that, at a certain distance, the sight neither 
 wanders nor sticks at special points ? 
 
 Everybody knows the condition under which a man 
 receives an effective visual impression, one that goes 
 to mould his view of the world. Whether he is looking 
 at a piece of still life, or is standing in a vast landscape, 
 he looks in a half dream ; he ceases to think, to feel his 
 own identity, for his whole consciousness is absorbed 
 in the eye. At these moments a certain focus is used, 
 a certain width of field is embraced, and these are not 
 determined by the man's conscious will, but by the 
 nature of his impression. To shift that focus to make 
 that field larger or smaller is to destroy the mood which 
 produced the impression. 
 
 If a cardboard of nearly ten inches wide be held at 
 arm's-length it can be comfortably regarded as a whole, 
 and of course any view, however distant, that it might 
 cover. But if it be placed at forty feet from the eye, 
 not without intentional effort or strain can the whole 
 attention be exclusively centred upon its area. On the 
 other hand, if it be held at about ten inches from the 
 eye one can embrace as a whole no more than such a 
 
I 
 
 LA INFANTA 
 
 DONA MARGARITA MARIA 
 
THE LESSON OF IMPRESSIONISM 119 
 
 small bit of it as would cover the entire cardboard 
 held at arm's-length. It would be wrong to say that it 
 is impossible to paint a larger field of sight than is 
 naturally embraced as one whole by the eye, but it is 
 certain that one would be compelled to determine the 
 force of many values or definitions in this too wide field 
 by reason instead of by feeling. Safety would lie only 
 in a very conventional line of treatment. Many realists, 
 however, would paint the scene covered by the card- 
 board held at ten inches from the eye by adding 
 together innumerable little impressions of fields covered 
 by the cardboard at forty feet from the eye. As far as 
 a perception of the ensemble goes, they remain as much 
 in the dark as a child of the final result of a long sum 
 in addition. 
 
 To lay down strict rules in such matters of feeling 
 as the width of an area of impression would be to 
 fetter practice, but it is curious to note that Leonardo, 
 centuries ago, suggested that the painter should be 
 supposed to stand at a distance from his picture of 
 three times its largest measurement. It was Leonardo 
 also who proposed to show the effect of distance on 
 local colour by painting on a sheet of glass held up 
 before the subject of a picture. The value of the 
 green of an elm at a hundred yards from you could 
 be thus compared with the value of that same green 
 at two or three hundred yards. In the same way, if 
 any one desires to convince himself of the subtleties 
 of natural definitions, let him take a brush and pretend 
 to paint, on the pane of a window, the view which 
 he sees through the glass. When he would follow 
 the sinuosities of form, obey the subtle changes of 
 definition, do justice to the myriad delicacies of detail, 
 
 k 
 
120 VELASQUEZ 
 
 he will confess that he has undertaken a task too 
 delicate for the nicest of Pre-Raphaelite nigglers. It 
 will be plain to him that the scene must be " treated," 
 and the main relations alone given. Twigs, stones, 
 slates, grass, leaves, can only be suggested ; an attempt 
 to define them really could result in nothing but a 
 coarse travesty, which must inevitably lessen the effect 
 of the more important markings. By varying his 
 distance from the pane, the experimenter may con- 
 vince himself that the difficulties of painting the scene 
 increase as the field of sight widens. He will see that 
 a wide angle must be treated differently from a narrow 
 one, a motif with one bold, detaching mass, differently 
 from one containing several smaller importances. 
 Besides meeting these more evident exigencies, he 
 must allow something for personal feeling. He will 
 find out how to realise on canvas the impression of 
 some object, how it should be placed on the canvas, 
 how much field shall surround it, and what portion 
 of that field, if any, represents a space lightly skimmed 
 by the mind, but a space nevertheless necessary to 
 impart some quality or some meaning to the chief 
 object. 
 
 It may be argued that you have only to imagine a 
 glass subtending to the eye, the same angle as the 
 said pane of glass, but much farther off, and a brush 
 fifty yards long to solve the difficulties of landscape 
 painting. Only in life-size painting of figure or still 
 life can this be realised practically, and then only 
 mechanical difficulties are removed. The problems 
 of how to employ modelling, relative forces of defini- 
 tion, and range of colour, in treating scenes of various 
 widths, depths, and fulness of interest, still remain to 
 

 THE LESSON OF IMPRESSIONISM 121 
 
 be solved by artistic feeling. But in this life-size 
 painting the task is more evident, at least to the 
 reason, and for this cause, possibly, impressionism was 
 first fully made manifest in the work of a portrait 
 painter, Velasquez. 
 
 People who use both the terms, realism and impres- 
 sionism, discriminate their meanings, and certainly 
 those who paint impressionistically will not confound 
 their practice with that of some realists. But many 
 people, in speaking of impressionism, imply that it 
 must be unmodelled, scarce drawn, roughly surfaced, 
 ugly, at least commonplace in subject. Others hold 
 that whatever else it may do, it must represent, like 
 an instantaneous photograph, passing movements by 
 blotches and blurs, and show you strange and really 
 unimpressionistic attitudes never seen in life, but 
 mechanically revealed by the camera. The work of 
 Velasquez should be sufficient evidence to persuade 
 them that they misunderstand the question. 
 
 Let us look at some of the uses of the term realism. 
 After an age dealing with saints in the clouds, or gods 
 in Olympus, a man may be called a realist because he 
 paints real life, a battle, the coronation of an emperor, 
 or boors drinking. This distinction of subject has 
 been shown on an earlier page to have little weight in 
 the art of painting ; and one may observe that, after 
 courtly subjects are exhausted, this bastard realism of 
 7notz/ is confined to low life. Nevertheless, there is 
 a realism, not literary, but pictorial ; the realism of 
 treatment which is applicable to any subject, religious, 
 mythological, heroic, courtly, or lowlived, even to still 
 life and landscape. Orpheus, Endymion, Hope, Love, 
 Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or a man digging 
 
122 VELASQUEZ 
 
 potatoes, may any of them be conceived realistically, 
 and painted from the model. But when we admit 
 this, and discriminate realism of subject from realism 
 of treatment, we still meet with various degrees of 
 realism. This man may be realistic in form only, and 
 fanciful in lighting and relations of value. That man, 
 again, may idealise form and yet paint it under a 
 realistic effect. In fact, realism of treatment depends 
 on a piecemeal sort of observation which may be taken 
 in instalments by successive schools. There is a 
 realism of drawing, of effect, of local colour, of atmos- 
 phere, of values, and all and any of these are pictorial 
 in their nature. 
 
 Now, impressionism allows many and divers impres- 
 sions, but each records a truth of general aspect. The 
 whole effect of the canvas conveys a definite idea 
 which has ordered every element drawing, colour, 
 and definition. Schools of painters are not, of course, 
 divided absolutely into decorative, realist, and impres- 
 sionist ; but we name them after the prevailing in- 
 tention of their works. The difference between realism 
 and impressionism may be illustrated out of the past by 
 the contrast between the Eclectics and the Naturalists 
 on the one hand, and Velasquez on the other. The 
 art of the first added, the other sprouted fresh qualities ; 
 one held its virtues in solution, the other in chemical 
 combination. 
 
 Those who have not been taught from the beginning 
 in an impressionistic school must remember difficulties 
 which beset them when they were working from nature, 
 and will recall how they only slowly began to appre- 
 ciate the meaning and the necessity of working from 
 a single impression. How often it seemed to them 
 
> 
 
THE LESSON OF IMPRESSIONISM 123 
 
 impossible to finish a picture. The more closely they 
 applied themselves to study and complete a part, the 
 more it seemed to change to their eyes, and to 
 invalidate their previous observations. After having 
 left his canvas for a rest such a man came back to 
 find this or that edge cut as if with a knife, this 
 shadow which should be blue and broad, hot and 
 speckled, and certainly all the mystery, grandeur, or 
 delicacy of the natural model painted out in common- 
 place. Again and again he tries, and each time that 
 he brings a fresh eye to bear upon the model, he 
 finds that all its characteristic beauty has evaporated 
 from his work. He may never attempt to enter upon 
 completeness, he is kept in the ante-room of pre- 
 liminary changes. 
 
 Now, all his separate observations may have been 
 true, but they were all made under different condi- 
 tions of attention to the scene ; whereas, until every 
 part of the picture has been observed in subservience 
 to the impression of the whole, completeness can 
 never be even begun. The largeness, the dignity, the 
 swim of nature seen under a distributed attention is 
 continually contradicted by the appearances which 
 result from separate observations made upon smaller 
 fields of sight. A shadow on the yellow sand will 
 alternately seem cold or warm, blue or orange, accord- 
 ing to the concentration or diffusion of the sight. 
 Everyone knows that when a shadow is looked at 
 alone it appears more full of colours than when the 
 surrounding sunlit parts of the view are taken in and 
 are allowed to operate on the shadow. 
 
 Many people must have seen English painters who 
 went out of their way to confuse their eyesight and 
 
124 VELASQUEZ 
 
 destroy all unity of impression. Some begin a large 
 landscape at the top of one corner, and finish it all 
 the way down bit by bit. Others make use of all 
 kinds of dodges to deceive themselves as to the im- 
 pression a natural scene has made on their senses. 
 These make a tunnel with their hands to shut out 
 everything but the one patch of colour they are 
 matching. These hold up white paper to gauge a 
 value; these match tints upon a palette-knife held 
 against the hues of nature ; these cut holes in a card 
 to look through ; and these peep through their legs, 
 their half-shut eyes, or into a small black mirror. 
 Such devices confound and obliterate the natural 
 impression when they are used as a means of finish- 
 ing a picture. Yet they have some of them a true 
 use, which is to persuade a beginner of the relativity 
 of tones and definitions, and their dependence upon 
 general impressions. Surely, however, it cannot but 
 lead to painting false aspects if one should try to 
 learn anything particular from nature seen under 
 such conditions. I have often seen men painting 
 sunsets who would shade out the sky with a hat or 
 hand that they might see what they were pleased to 
 call the true colour of the ground. Of course, the 
 grass instantly became of quite another colour to what 
 it had been when the sky entered the painter^s eyes 
 at the same time. But they seemed unaware that 
 they were painting by this process two quite different 
 effects in one frame. 
 
 English teaching has been contrary to impressionism, 
 and Velasquez has not been suflSciently, or at any 
 rate rightly, admired. Many painters and writers of 
 influence have condemned impressionism in a manner 
 
THE LESSON OF IMPRESSIONISM 125 
 
 which showed that they neither knew nor cared any- 
 thing about it. Whatever has been gained in England 
 in this direction lately has been gained at the bayonet 
 point of abuse and strong language. The English 
 schools never taught one to " place " a figure or cast 
 on the canvas. They would not permit of blocking 
 in either squarely or roundly. They expected you 
 to begin a thing by finishing. They accustomed the 
 student from the outset of his career to overlook 
 subtle differences of large planes, to miss the broader 
 sweep of a line for the sake of tight detailed modelling, 
 and the exaggerated indenting of small bays in an 
 outline. They gave gold medals to chalk drawings 
 in which every little muscle was modelled up to a 
 high light, whilst an important change of plane, such 
 as the set-back of the chest, was shown by a wrong 
 general value. It is not wonderful that people so 
 taught saw only one side of the art of Velasquez, 
 and that their system of teaching is now abandoned 
 for one which has been, to a large extent, based on 
 the practice of the great Spanish impressionist. 
 
CATALOGUE OF THE WORKS OF 
 
 VELASQUEZ 
 
 AND OF CERTAIN WORKS ATTRIBUTED TO THE 
 
 ARTIST, ARRANGED ACCORDING TO THE 
 
 GALLERIES IN WHICH THEY 
 
 ARE CONTAINED 
 
NOTE 
 
 Where the measurements of the pictures are given^ the height 
 always precedes the width. 
 
 Where numbers are given, thus [No. 6.], they are the numbers 
 of the Catalogue of the Gallery. These cannot of course beguaran- 
 teed, as alterations are not unfrequently made in the arrangement 
 of the pictures. 
 
 An asterisk denotes that the picture is reproduced in this 
 volume. 
 
CATALOGUE OF WORKS. 
 
 AMERICA. 
 
 METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK. 
 A Fruit Piece. 
 
 YALE COLLEGE, U.S.A. 
 A Male Portrait. 
 
 AUSTRIA. 
 
 THE PICTURE GALLERY, VIENNA. 
 
 The Infanta Maria Teresa. 4 ft. x 3 ft. 6 in. [No. 609.] 
 
 Don Felipe Prosper, son of Philip IV. (1657-1661), 
 4 ft. 3 in. X 3 ft. 3 in. [No. 611.] 
 
 Philip IV. 4 ft. 2 in. x 2 ft. 9 in. [No. 612.] 
 
 A Young Man holding a Flower and laughing. 
 2 ft. 9 in. X 2 ft. I in. [No. 613.] 
 
 The Infanta Margarita Maria as a Child. 4 ft. 3 in. 
 X 3 ft. 4 in. [No. 615.] 
 
 Don Baltazar Carlos. 4 ft. 3 in. x 3 ft. 4 in. [No. 616.] 
 
 The Archduchess Maria Anna. 4 ft. 2 in. x 3 ft. 3 in. 
 [No. 617.] 
 
 Another Portrait of the same. 4 ft. 2 in. x 3 ft. 3 in. 
 [No. 618.] 
 
 The Infanta Margarita Teresa as a Child. 3 ft. 6 in. 
 X 2 ft. 10 in. [No. 619.] (See Frankfort) 
 
 Portrait of the same. 4 ft. X3ft.2 in. [No. 621.] 
 
 The Queen Isabella of Spain, Daughter of Henry 
 IV., AND first Wife of Philip IV. of Spain (1602- 
 1644). 4 ft. 4 in. X 3 ft. 4 in. [No. 622.] 
 I 129 
 
I30 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 BRITISH ISLES. 
 
 BUCKINGHAM PALACE. 
 
 The Infante Don Baltazar Carlos, eldest son of 
 Philip IV. (1629-1686). 6 ft. 10 in. x 3 ft. 5 in. 
 
 This picture is said to have been presented by Philip IV. 
 to Charles I. of England. A boy about ten years old is 
 standing, bareheaded, by a table covered with red velvet. 
 He wears armour enriched with gold, a falling lace 
 collar, a red scarf, red embroidered breeches, and steel 
 gauntlets ; he has a baton in his right hand, and his left 
 rests on a sword ; at his right is a red velvet chair. 
 
 A replica of this picture is at the Hague, 
 
 NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain Hunting the Wild Boar. 
 6 ft. 2 in. X 10 ft. 3 in. [No. 197.] 
 
 The hunt is taking place in an enclosed piece of ground, 
 in the front of which are many spectators. 
 
 Formerly in the Royal Palace at Madrid. Presented by 
 Ferdinand VII. to the late Lord Cowley^ from whom it was 
 purchased in 1846. 
 
 The Adoration of the Shepherds. 7 ft. 7 in. x 5 ft. 
 6 in. [No. 232.] 
 
 An early picture in the style of Spagnoletto. 
 Purchased for Louis Philippe by Baron Taylor from the 
 Count del Aguila and for the National Gallery in 1853. 
 
 A Dead Warrior. 3 ft. 5 in. x 5 ft. 5 in. Engraved, in 
 1864, by Flameng, for the "Gazette des Beaux-arts." 
 [No. 741.] 
 
 Known as "El Orlando Muerto," or Roland dead. On 
 right the fully dressed and armed body of a man, Ijife-size, is 
 seen lying on its back, the right hand placed on his 'chest, 
 the left resting on the hilt of his sword. The figure is 
 considerably foreshortened. Over the dead man's feet, 
 suspended to a branch, is a small brass lamp ; on either 
 side human skulls and other bones. In the background 
 storm-driven clouds, with the first faint dawn of day 
 appearing. 
 
 Purchased in Paris ^ at the sale of the Pourtalh Collection 
 in 1865, and commonly ascribed to Velasquez. 
 
BRITISH ISLES 131 
 
 Philip IV., King of Spain. 2 ft. i in, x i ft. 8 in. 
 
 [No. 745.] 
 
 Bust, life-size, in black and gold ; head seen nearly in 
 full face. 
 
 Formerly in the collection of Prince Demidoff^ Florence, 
 Purchased in Paris from M. Sano in 1865. 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain. 6 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 8 in. [No. 11 29.] 
 
 Full length, life-size, three-quarter face turned to the right. 
 Dressed in a doublet and trunk hose, white sleeves and 
 brown gloves. From a chain round his neck is suspended 
 the Order of the Golden Fleece. In his right hand a 
 letter, on which the painter's name is inscribed ; his left 
 hand rests on the hilt of his sword. 
 
 Purchased in London^ at the sale of the Hamilton Palace 
 pictures^ in 1882. 
 
 * Christ at the Column. 5 ft. 3 in. x 6 ft. 8 in. 
 
 [No; II 48.] See illustration facing p. 60. 
 
 Presented by the Right Hon, Sir fohn Savile^ G.C.B. 
 {afterwards Lord Saviie\ in 1883. 
 
 * The Admiral Pulido Pare; a. 6 ft. 9. in. x 3 ft. 8 in. 
 
 [No. 1 315.] See illustration facing p. 40. 
 
 Signed and dated, 1639. Palomino is the chief authority 
 for this picture. He says it was done with unusually long 
 brushes. He mentions the signature and inscription. 
 Another version, with accessories added later, belongs to 
 the Duke of Bedford. 
 
 Purchased in 1890 out of the Longford Cattle Collection. 
 
 Christ in the House of Martha, i ft. 11 in. x 3 ft. 
 4 in. [No. 1375.] 
 
 On left, a kitchenmaid, half-length, stands at a table, while 
 a woman standing behind touches her on the shoulder. 
 On the table a dish of fish, plate of eggs, and water jug. 
 In background, through aperture in the wall, is seen the 
 Saviour seated, addressing Martha, who stands, and Mary, 
 who kneels before him. 
 
 BequeatJied by the Right Hon. Sir William H Gregory 
 in 1892. 
 
 Sketch of the Duel in the Prado near Madrid. 2 ft. 
 10 in. x 4 ft. [No. 1376.] 
 
132 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 In the foreground, four cavaliers, accompanied by an 
 attendant with pony, watching a horseman, who gallops 
 towards their opponents, in the middle distance. Beyond, 
 a hilly country, with grey sky. 
 
 Some of the figures in the foreground resemble the 
 group in Velasquez's " Boar Hunt." 
 
 Bequeathed by the Right Hon, Sir William H. Gregory 
 in 1892. 
 
 * A Betrothal. 6 ft. 7 in. x 5 ft. 11 in. [No. 1434.] 
 
 At a table on an elevated platform a cavalier, with long 
 hair, in dark brown cloth, and wearing a mantle on which 
 is the cross of St lago. He holds a pen. in his right hand ; 
 his left hand rests on the shoulder of a child gaily dressed. 
 Behind her, on the extreme right, a duenna or attendant. 
 To the left, behind the table, are two young men. Below, 
 in front of the platform, the upper part of two figures of the 
 size of Hfe are seen. 
 
 Formerly in the possession of Sir Edwin Landseer^ R.A. 
 
 Presented by Lord Savile in 1895. 
 
 DULWICH COLLEGE PICTURE GALLERY. 
 *Philip IV. 4 ft. 2 in. X 3 ft. 2 in. 
 
 Three-quarter length figure, life-size, turned to the left ; 
 red doublet with silver embroidery, white silk sleeves, and 
 white falling collar ; the left arm on his sword ; in left hand 
 his hat ; in right his staff. 
 
 This shows the king in his dress as commander-in-chief 
 at the age of thirty-nine or forty. Both this canvas and the 
 similar one in the Lyne-Stephens collection have been 
 considered as old copies of the original Fraga picture. 
 
 From the Bouchardon and Tronchin Collections, 
 
 HAMPTON COURT GALLERY. 
 Philip IV. 
 
 Elizabeth de Bourbon, Queen of Philip IV. 
 These are attributed to Velasquez. 
 
 HERTFORD HOUSE GALLERY, LONDON. 
 A Lady with a Fan. 3 ft. x 2 ft. 3 in. 
 From the Aquado Collection. 
 
 The Infante Don Baltazar Carlos on Horseback. 
 4 ft. 3 in. X 3 ft. 4 in. 
 
 From the Rogers Collection, 
 
BRITISH ISLES 133 
 
 The Infante Don Baltazar Carlos, at Three Years 
 Old, with a Baton. 3 ft. 10 in. x 3 ft. i in. 
 
 He is in a grey dress with violet scarf, and wears a sword. 
 From the Standish Collection. 
 
 The Infante Don Baltazar Carlos. 
 
 An Infanta of Spain. 
 
 A standing, full-length figure in black dress with white 
 sleeves. 
 
 Landscape with a Boar Hunt. A sketch for the 
 National Gallery Picture. 
 
 Bought at Lord NorthwicHs sale, 
 Philip IV. 
 The Count-Duke d'Olivarez. 
 
 ^ORSTER M. ALLEYNE, Esq. 
 
 Don Giovanni Jacopo Theodoro Trivulzi (1597-165 7). 
 Created a Prince of the Empire 1622, Cardinal 1626, 
 and subsequently a Grandee of Spain, Viceroy of Sicily 
 1647, Governor of Milan 1656. 7 ft. x 3 ft. 10 in. 
 
 He wears a black coat, red cloak and hat, high buflf boots, 
 and the collar of the Golden Fleece ; with right hand he 
 rests baton against his thigh, his left is on his hip ; to the 
 right, at his feet, are cuirass and helmet. New Gall. 1895. 
 
 THE DUKE OF BEDFORD, WOBURN ABBEY, 
 BEDFORDSHIRE. 
 
 Don Adrian Pulido Pareja. 6 ft. 5 in. x 3 ft. 6 in. 
 
 Full-length, standing. Black dress with white sleeves 
 and large collar and the red cross of Santiago. A naval 
 engagement seen through an opening to the right. 
 
 A Man. 
 C. F. A. BREUL, Esq. 
 The Duke of Medina, i ft. 8 in. x i ft. 6 in. 
 Black dress ; wide lace collar. R.A. 1896. 
 
 RALPH BANKES, Esq., KINGSTON LACY, WIM- 
 BORNE. 
 
 Las Meninas. A sketch for the Madrid picture. 
 
134 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 Cardinal Caspar de Berja, Archbishop of Seville 
 AND Toledo. 
 
 Philip IV., standing. Painted for the first Marquis of 
 Leganes. 
 
 From the Altamira Collectiotu 
 
 LORD BERWICK. 
 A Spanish Infante with Dogs. 4 ft. 4 in. x 3 ft. 4 in. 
 A boy with a gun and three dogs. R.A. 1886. 
 
 HERCULES B. BRABAZON, Esq. 
 
 Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. 
 (1634-1696). 
 
 In black dress, scalloped lace collarette, and gold chain. 
 Said to have come from the Altamira Gallery, R,A. 
 1875. 
 MARQUIS OF BRISTOL, ICWORTH PARK. 
 Don Baltazar Carlos. 5 ft. x 2 ft. 1 1 in. 
 
 Full length of boy standing with a gun in his hand, and 
 three dogs beside him. Brown dress and cap, lace collar, 
 leather gloves. 
 
 CHARLES BUTLER, Esq., 3 CONNAUGHT PLACE, W. 
 Pope Innocent X. 3 ft. 2 in. x 4 ft. 5 in. 
 
 Seated, wearing a white linen robe with white sleeves, 
 a linen collar, red velvet cap and cape. In his left 
 hand is a paper inscribed : ALLA SANTH N^ SIGH 
 INNOCENTIO X2 PER. 
 
 A replica is in the Doria Palace at Rome, 
 
 THE EARL OF CARLISLE, CASTLE HOWARD, 
 YORK. 
 Don Baltazar Carlos, Eldest Son of Philip IV. 
 ( 1 629-1 646), AND HIS Dwarf. 4 ft. 7 in. x 2 ft. 8 in. 
 
 A child with fair hair and dark eyes, in black velvet 
 petticoat embroidered with gold, a scarf crossing his breast, 
 a sword in one hand, and a staff in the other, is chasing a 
 dwarf, who runs away with a silver bauble and an apple. 
 A black velvet hat with white feather lies on a red cushion 
 to the right. 
 
 Juan de Pareja, a Moorish slave, who was in the service 
 
BRITISH ISLES 13S 
 
 of Velasquez, and became a great painter. 2 ft. 5 in. 
 X 2 ft. 
 
 A mulatto, with broad white collar falling over a grey 
 doublet. 
 
 A replica of Lord Radnor's picture. See page 139. 
 
 Dona Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip 
 IV. ( 1 634-1 696). I ft. 9 in. X I ft. 5 in. 
 
 In a white fur tippet, with chains of jewels, hair in rolls 
 and adorned with butterflies. 
 
 MISS COHEN, ADELAIDE CRESCENT, BRIGHTON. 
 
 A Man. 2 ft. 6 in. x 2 ft. 
 
 Half-length, life-sized. He is wearing armour, with sash 
 over right shoulder, white lace collar, long black hair. 
 
 MONS. A CASSO. 
 
 Portrait of a Young Man. i ft. 10 in. x i ft. 4 in. 
 Black dress and white collar, long hair. R,A. 1895. 
 
 SIR FRANCIS COOK, Bart., DOUGHTY HOUSE, 
 RICHMOND. 
 
 Two Peasants : A Kitchen Scene. 3 ft. 3 in. x 
 3 ft. 10 in. 
 
 Woman, seated, making an omelette in an earthen pan ; 
 on left a boy with melon under his arm, and offering her a 
 wine-flask ; in front various utensils. 
 
 Portrait of the Painter, i ft. 10 in. x i ft. 6 in. 
 
 Long black hair and moustache, black coat and golilla ; 
 in front hangs a gold chain with the badge of Santiago. 
 
 Acquired by Lord Cowley when Ambassador in Madrid. 
 An injured copy of this^ in which the Santiago Cross is 
 07nittedy is at Valencia. 
 
 Dona Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. 
 (1634- 1 696). 2 ft. 2 in. X I ft. 10 in. 
 
 In dark green dress, with large puffed sleeves, gauze 
 collarette trimmed with narrow ribbon and having large 
 rosette in front. Hair low on both shoulders, adorned with 
 rosette of brown ribbons. 
 
 Probably painted imfnediately after her marriage^ as in 
 wearing her hair long she has evidently not yet adopted 
 the Spanish coiffure of the period. 
 
 ft 
 
136 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 A Spanish Beggar. 4 ft. 6 in. x 4 ft. 
 
 ^ Man in ragged dress, leaning on a crutch, holding in his 
 right hand a wine-flask, resting on a globe on which is a 
 landscape with peasants dancing before a bodega. 
 
 On the frame is inscribed : Viva el vino leche de los 
 viejos. 
 
 Brought from Spain by the French officer^ General 
 Caulaincourt^ and purchased of him by an English officer 
 at Genoa in 18 18. 
 
 THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE, DEVONSHIRE 
 HOUSE, W. 
 
 A Lady. 3 ft. 2 in. x i ft. 6 in. 
 
 Dressed in a lemon-coloured silk gown, with wide sleeves 
 and white lace collar. She holds a mantilla and hand- 
 kerchief. 
 
 GEORGE DONALDSON, Esq. 
 
 A Chorister. 2 ft. 8 in. x 2 ft. 3 in. 
 
 Half-length figure standing to the right ; white surplice ; 
 holding open music-book with both hands. 
 
 THE EARL OF ELLESMERE, BRIDGEWATER 
 HOUSE. 
 
 A Natural Son of the Count-Duke d'Olivarez. 
 
 From the Altamira Collection, 
 Philip IV. 
 Velasquez. 
 
 A replica of the one at Florence. 
 
 THE EARL OF ELGIN, BROOME HALL, FIFE. 
 Don Caspar de Guzman the Count-Duke d'Olivarez. 
 4 ft. I in. X 3 ft. 4 in. 
 
 In armour on a white horse standing on its hind legs. 
 He wears a richly-embroidered crimson scarf and brown 
 boots, and carries a baton. 
 
 Innocent X. 
 
 A Dog with a Bone. 
 
 SIR WILLIAM FARRER. 
 
 View of the Alameda at Seville. 5 ft. 4 in. x 3 ft. 6 in. 
 From the Louis Philippe Collection. 
 
BRITISH ISLES 137 
 
 [ECUTORS OF THE LATE SIR CLARE FORD. 
 
 Don Caspar de Cuzman the Count-Duke d'Olivarez 
 (1587-1643). 2 ft. 2 in. X I ft. 10 in. 
 
 In black, wearing digolzlla or stiff linen collar, over which 
 is a cloak, partly concealing the green cross of Alcantara 
 on his breast. 
 
 Purchased by Richard Ford from the Madrid Gallery of 
 General Meade, 
 
 Dona Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. 
 (1634- 1 696). 4 ft. 9 in. X 3 ft. 8 in. 
 
 In black hooped dress and basque, double row of pearls 
 crossing from shoulder to shoulder. A clock is on a table 
 to the right. 
 
 Dona Isabel de Bourbon, First Wife of Philip IV. 
 (1602- 1 644). 2 ft. I in. X I ft. 7 in. 
 
 Three-quarter bust to the left ; black embroidered dress 
 and ruff, ribbons in her hair, and a rope of pearls crossing 
 her breast and shoulders. 
 Painted in 1623. 
 From General Mead^s Collection, 
 
 LADY GREGORY. 
 
 A Peasant Boy feeding Fowls. 4 ft. 8 in. x 6 ft. 5 in. 
 LORD HEYTESBURY, HEYTESBURY. 
 A sketch for the Picture at Madrid called "Les 
 Borrachos." 
 
 [It contains only six figures, while the Madrid picture has 
 nine.] 
 
 CAPTAIN HOLFORD, HOLFORD HOUSE. 
 A Field-Marshal in Armour. 
 Philip IV. 2 ft. 7 in. x 2 ft. 
 
 Half-length figure in close-fitting black silk habit, white 
 golilla^ and the chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece. 
 
 Two superb portraits also, perhaps the finest in England, 
 one of Philip IV. standing, and the companion one of 
 Olivarez. 
 
 W. HOLMAN HUNT, Esq. 
 St. Sebastian. Panel, i ft. 6 in. x i ft. i in. 
 
 Small, almost nude, three-quarter length figure of the 
 saint, standing facing the spectator, one arm tied above 
 his head, the other behind him. 
 
138 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 EDWARD HUTH, Esq. 
 
 Philip IV. (1621-1665). 6 ft. 10 in. x 4 ft. i in. 
 
 Full-length life-sized figure in black dress, wearing the 
 Order of the Golden Fleece. Cloak thrown back over his 
 shoulder ; left hand, which rests on his sword, holds his 
 
 hat; in his right hand is a paper inscribed "SENOR"; 
 both hands are gloved. On the right, through an open 
 door, is an inner room, at the end of which is a pyx on a 
 table. 
 
 From the Louis Philippe Collection, 
 
 Dona Isabel de Bourbon, First Wife of Philip IV. 
 (i 602-1 644). 6 ft. 7 in. X 3 ft. 8 in. 
 
 Wearing black hooped dress, with border of leaves of 
 gold, white ruff, feather in hair ; in left hand a Chinese fan. 
 
 Don Caspar de Guzman the Count-Duke d'Olivarez 
 (i 587-1 643). 6 ft. 9 in. X 3 ft. 7 in. 
 
 In a richly-embroidered black dress, over which is a 
 short cloak, bearing the green cross of Alcantara, a linen 
 collar, low shoes, and a broad gold chain across his breast ; 
 in right hand a wand, as Master of the Horse. 
 
 MARQUIS OF LANSDOWNE, BOWOOD, CALNE. 
 The Count-Duke d'Olivarez. 
 
 From the Collection of Don Manuel Godoy. 
 Pope Innocent X. 
 
 A replica of the Palazzo Doria Portrait, 
 A Child in Bed. 
 Velasquez. 
 
 Landscape, with two mounted Cavaliers and other 
 Figures, seated, and the Sea in the background. 
 
 Landscape, with Cavaliers, Ladies, and Dwarfs^ a 
 
 SlERA in the background. 
 
 These two pictures were brought into Efigland from 
 Madrid by Mr Bourke, the Danish Minister, 
 
 J. PIERPOINT MORGAN, Esq. 
 An Infanta. 4 ft. 9 in. x 3 ft. 4 in. 
 
 Black dress with scarlet bow, wide lace collar, pearl 
 necklace, crimson cap. R.A, 1896. 
 
BRITISH ISLES 139 
 
 J. H. MACFADDEN, Esq. 
 
 Dona Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. 
 ( 1 634-1 696). 2 ft. 2 in. X I ft. 9 in. 
 
 In a white and black dress ; gold chain over her shoulder ; 
 hair adorned with red bows and red and white feather. 
 From the Lyne-Stephens Collection, New Gall 1895. 
 
 MISS CLARA MONTALBA. 
 
 A Flute-Player. 2 ft. 3 in. x i ft. 8 in. 
 
 A man in a white dress, and black cloak thrown over his 
 shoulder, playing on a flute. New Gall. 1895. 
 
 R. A. MORRITT, Esq., ROKEBY PARK. 
 
 * Venus and Cupid. 4 ft. x 5 ft. 9 in. 
 
 Full-length nude figure of Venus lying on a couch, her 
 back to the spectator, and her head raised to look at herself 
 in a mirror held up by a Cupid kneeling on one knee in front 
 of a red curtain. /?.-i. 1890. 
 
 THE EARL OF NORTHBROOK, G.C.I.E., STRATTON, 
 WINCHESTER. 
 
 Philip IV. on Horseback, i f t. 11 in. x i ft. 5 in. 
 
 On bay horse with four white legs, galloping to the right. 
 He wears armour of steel inlaid with gold, a wthiie golilla, a 
 plumed hat with pointed brim, and a crimson scarf, which 
 floats behind, and he carries a baton. 
 
 From the Rogers Collection, in the catalogue of which it is 
 said that this is the finished sketch of the great picture under 
 which it used to hang in the palace of Buen Re tiro. 
 
 THE DUKE OF NORTHUMBERLAND, ALNWICK 
 
 CASTLE. 
 
 Pedro Alcantara. 
 
 THE HON. Mrs PRESTON. 
 
 A Lady. 4 ft. 2 in. x 3 ft. 2 in. 
 
 Black dress, large black collar trimmed with yellow pearl 
 necklace, and ear-rings. New Gall. 1895. 
 
 SIR CUTHBERT QUIETER. 
 
 Dona Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip 
 IV. (1634-1696). 4 ft. 10 in. X 3 ft. II in. 
 
I40 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 Similar to Sir Clare Ford's portrait, except that the hair 
 is arranged in ringlets, with red bows, and she wears a 
 gold chain over her shoulders. 
 
 From the Clifden Collection. New Gall. 1895. 
 
 THE EARL OF RADNOR, LONGFORD CASTLE. 
 Juan de Pareja. [No. 88.] 
 Painted in Rome in 1650. 
 {See replica in the possession of Lord Carlisle^ 
 
 SIR J. CHARLES ROBINSON, HARLEY STREET, W. 
 
 Don Francisco de Ribas, Corregidor de Madrid, and 
 Knight of Santiago. Oval, 3 ft. 2 in. x 2 ft. 7 in. 
 
 Half-length life-size, full face ; black dress. He holds a 
 letter in his right hand ; the jewel of the Order of Santiago 
 is pendent from a ribbon on his dress, and a large 
 embroidered red cross of the same order is on his sleeve. 
 
 The face only is by Velasquez, as the picture is said to 
 have been left unfinished at the death of the painter. 
 
 Jael and Sisera. 3 ft. II in. x 4 ft. 3 in. 
 
 Believed to have been painted in 1623. The armour in 
 which Sisera is clad was painted from the actual suit made 
 in the antique style for the Emperor Charles V., and still 
 preserved at Madrid. The figure in full armour on the 
 right is a posthumous portrait of the great Duke of Alva ; 
 that on the left of the Count-Duke d'Olivarez. 
 
 The composition is supposed to be intended as an alle- 
 gorical illustration or reference to the assassination of Wil- 
 liam the Silent of Holland, the chief enemy of Spain in 
 the preceding century. 
 
 The picture bears a monogrammatic or abbreviated 
 signature in the right hand lower corner. 
 
 GEORGE SALTING, Esq., BERKELEY SQUARE. 
 Child and Serving-Man. 3 ft. 5 in. x i ft. 1 1 in. 
 
 Young girl about three years old seated before a table, 
 on which is a silver plate containing grapes. She holds 
 some of the fruit in her right hand, whilst her left, sketched 
 in only, is grasped by a man who bends over her ; the 
 head only of the latter figure is completely finished, draperies 
 and accessories only sketched in. 
 From the Earl of Clarets Collection, 
 
 M. LEON SOMZEE. 
 The Vegetable Seller. New Gall. 1895. 
 
BRITISH ISLES 141 
 
 THE DUKE OF SUTHERLAND, STAFFORD HOUSE, 
 LONDON. 
 
 The Duke of Gandia (?) at a Convent Door. 
 From the Soult Collection, 
 
 St. Charles Borromeo at a Chapter. 
 
 A knight kneeling before a priest, with three knights and 
 two pages. 
 
 A Rocky Landscape, with a Man on a White Horse, 
 
 AND A Woman and two Beggars lying down. 
 St. Francis Borgia arriving at the Jesuits' College. 
 
 THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON. 
 
 Innocent X. (1645-1655). 2 ft. 7 in. x 2 ft. 3 in. 
 
 Half-length life-size, turned slightly to the right, and 
 looking at the spectator; red cap and cape, and white 
 collar. 
 
 See similar picture in the Hermitage Gallery. 
 
 Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580-1645). 
 
 2 ft. X I ft. 10 in. 
 
 Life-size bust, looking at the spectator ; black costume, 
 white golilla ; abundant greyish frizzled hair, and large 
 double eyeglass on his nose. 
 
 Poet and novelist, secretary to Queen Anne, wife of 
 Philip n. 
 
 This is doubtless the portrait named by Palomino, iii. 333, 
 in which the poet is described as with glasses, which he was 
 accustomed to wear. 
 
 Two Boys. 2 ft. i in. x 3 ft. 4 in. 
 
 Life-sized. Two boys seated at a table laden with dishes, 
 and a jar surmounted by an orange. One boy, in a buff 
 jacket, IS drinking, and the other looking at him. 
 
 A Man. 2 ft. 5 in. x 2 ft. i in. 
 
 Half-length life-sized figure, in black dress and white 
 golilla. 
 
 The Water Carrier, "El Aquador de Seville." 
 
 3 ft. 4 in. X 2 ft. 6 in. 
 
 A man, in tattered brown doublet, with his left hand on a 
 large earthen jar, hands a glass of water to a boy, who stands 
 beside a table, on which is a smaller jar ; another boy 
 drinks from a pot. 
 
142 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 This picture was painted about 1620, at Seville, ere 
 Velasquez went to Madrid. In 1780 it was in the Alcazar 
 Quarto del Rey. 
 
 King Joseph Bonaparte took it with him in his flight 
 from Madrid ; but it was captured in his carriage at the 
 rout of Vittoria, and afterwards presented by Ferdinand VII. 
 to the Duke of Wellington. 
 
 THE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER, K.G., GROSVENOR 
 HOUSE, PARK LANE, W. 
 
 The Infante Don Baltazar Carlos, Eldest Son of 
 Philip IV. (i 629-1 686). 4 ft. 9 in. x 3 ft. 3 in. 
 
 The Prince, as a boy, wearing a costume enriched with 
 silver and gold, a crimson scarf, and a plumed black hat, 
 is mounted on a prancing pony in a court of the Palace, 
 and attended by several officers. The King, and Queen 
 Isabel, are to be seen at a balcony of the building, which 
 serves as a background. 
 
 Palomino iii. 332, refers to this picture as being in the 
 possession of the Marquis de Liche, nephew of d'Olivarez. 
 It was probably painted about 1641. 
 
 A Young Man. Panel, i ft. 10 in. x i ft. 5 in. 
 
 Bust to right, life-size, looking front over his shoulder, 
 wearing fur cape, cap adorned with crimson ribbons, and 
 orange-coloured coat. 
 
 This has been incorrectly called a portrait of Velasquez 
 (see Curtis, 208). 
 
 THE EARL STANHOPE. 
 
 A Gentleman. 
 
 THE EARL OF CLARENDON. 
 Philip IV. hunting the Wild Boar. 
 The Alameda, Seville. 
 
 THE EARL OF LECONFIELD, PETWORTH PARK. 
 Male Portrait. 
 
 THE EARL OF SOUTHESK, KINNAIRD CASTLE. 
 Group of Peasants. 
 
 LORD KINNAIRD, ROSSIE PRIORY. 
 Portrait of a Gentleman. 
 
BRITISH ISLES IRELAND 143 
 
 THE EARL OF WEMYSS. 
 
 Male Portrait. Spanish Lady. Fish and Fruits. 
 Two Landscapes. 
 
 THE EARL OF DUDLEY. 
 
 Sta. Clara. A Man's Portrait. 
 
 LORD ASHBURTON. 
 
 Portrait of Philip IV. A Boar Hunt. A Dwarf 
 WITH Dog and Parrot. A Landscape. 
 
 THE MARQUIS OF BUTE. 
 
 Full-Length Portrait of Innocent X. 
 
 BRITISH MUSEUM. 
 
 A Drawing of Horses. 
 
 See Portfolio monograph^ Part IT. p. loi. 
 
 IRELAND. 
 
 NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN. 
 Legend of St. Anthony, i ft 8 in. x i ft. 4 in. 
 [No. 34.] 
 
 The saint is represented taking small dead fishes from a 
 dish, held by a young man at his side, and placing them in 
 a fountain of water, which brings them to life again. The 
 youth on his left looks on in an attitude of astonishment 
 
 An early picture. 
 
 Purchased at Leeds in 1868. 
 
 The Infanta Dona Maria of Austria, Daughter of 
 Philip IV. 7 ft. x 3 ft. 8 in. 
 
 This picture is one of which there are many repetitions 
 in Europe, and may possibly be an old copy. It has 
 suffered much by cleaning. 
 
 THE DUKE OF ABERCORN, K.G., BARONS COURT. 
 Don Baltazar Carlos, Eldest Son of Philip IV. 
 (i 629-1 646). 5 ft. 2 in. X 3 ft. 6 in. 
 
 A lad about seven years old, wearing black plumed hat, 
 black dress embroidered with gold, falling lace collar, long 
 black hose, shoes, and gauntlets, standing in a piazza, holding 
 with his right hand a gun by its muzzle ; a large dog lies on 
 the left, and two greyhounds on the right. 
 
144 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 FRANCE. 
 THE LOUVRE, PARIS. 
 
 * Portrait of the Infanta Margarita Maria, after- 
 
 wards Wife of Leopold I., Emperor of Germany 
 (1651-1673). 2 ft. 4 in. X 2 ft. [No. 1731.] 
 
 She stands almost in full face, her right hand resting on 
 a chair, the left one down holding a flower. Robe is of pearl- 
 coloured taffeta trimmed with black lace, a necklace and 
 gold chain. The picture is inscribed in large letters, 
 
 "L'infante marguerite." 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain (1605-1669). i ft. 4 in. X4 ft. 
 [No. 1732.] 
 
 The king stands upright, bareheaded, dressed as a 
 sportsman, and holding a gun in his gloved right hand. 
 Near a tree to the left is a dog. 
 
 From the Napoleon Collection. 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain (1605-1665). i ft. 4 in. x i ft. 2 in. 
 [No. 1733.] 
 
 Head only. Three-quarter profile, curled-up moustache, 
 and curly hair. 
 
 * A Meeting of Thirteen Persons, i ft. 4 in. x 2 ft. 
 
 6 in. [No. 1734.] 
 
 On a hillock are Spanish gentlemen in groups talking 
 together ; on the left are Velasquez, Murillo, and a third 
 figure. 
 
 From the Collection of the Marquis de Forbin-Janson, 
 
 Bought in 185 1 of M, Lauenville. 
 
 Queen Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. 
 2 ft. 4 in. X 2 ft. [No. 1735.] 
 
 The child, about twelve years old, wears white satin 
 bodice, on which is the badge of an order and a bow 
 of ribbon. Hair adorned with pink bows, jewels, and a 
 white feather. 
 
 Bought at M. Viardofs sale in 1863. 
 
 A Young Woman. Oval. 2 ft. 8 in. x 2 ft. i 
 [No. 1736.] 
 
 She wears a black-and-white dress, and her puffed hair 
 falls on a white collar crossed by a double string of pearls. 
 
 j 
 
FRANCE GERMANY 14S 
 
 Don Pedro de Altamira, the Dean of the Royal 
 Chapel in Toledo, afterwards a Cardinal. 3 ft. 
 X 2 ft. 6 in. [No. 1737.] 
 
 The picture is inscribed: "iE 54, DN. 1633." 
 
 THE MUSEUM, ROUEN. 
 Portrait of a Man, " The Geographer." 
 
 GERMANY. 
 
 ROYAL MUSEUM, BERLIN. 
 
 Alessandro del Borro, Italian Commander. 6 ft. 9 in. 
 X 4 ft. [No. 41 3A.] 
 
 Purchased in Florence in 1873. 
 
 Maria Anna, Sister of Philip IV. of Spain. 6 ft. 8 in. 
 X 3 ft. 6 in. [413c.] 
 
 Sucrtnondt Collection, 1 874. 
 
 A Spanish Court Dwarf. 4 ft. 7 in. x 3 ft. 3 in. [No. 
 
 413D.] 
 
 Bought in Vienna in 1 879. 
 
 A Woman. 4 ft. x 3 ft. 3 in. [No. 413E.] 
 
 Purchased from Lord Dudley's Collection in 1 887. 
 
 ROYAL PICTURE GALLERY, DRESDEN. 
 
 Caspar de Guzman the Count-Duke d'Olivarez. 3 ft. 
 
 X 2 ft. 5 in. [No. 622.] 
 
 In black costume, and wearing the green cross of the 
 Order of Alcantara. 
 
 A Man in Black Costume with a Gold Cord. 2 ft. 2 in. 
 X I ft. 10 in. [No. 623.] 
 
 A Man in Black Costume. 3 ft. 5 in. x 2 ft. 10 in. 
 [No. 624.] 
 
 STADEL GALLERY, FRANKFORT. 
 Cardinal Borgia. 
 
 The Infanta Margarita Teresa. 
 
 A replica of the portrait at Vienna, 619. 
 
 K 
 
146 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 OLD PINAKOTHEK, MUNICH. 
 
 The Artist. 2 ft. x i ft. 8 in. [No 1292.] 
 
 He wears a black vest, with standing collar, and upon 
 his breast is a medal. Much repainted. 
 From the Dusseldorf Gallery. 
 
 A Young Spaniard, without Beard, in a Black 
 Dress. Canvas. 2 ft. 11 in. x 2 ft. 3 in. [No. 1293.] 
 From the Dusseldorf Gallery, 
 
 The Infanta Dona Maria Marguerita, Daughter 
 OF Philip IV. of Spain, as a Child. 4 ft. 6 in. 
 X 5 ft. 4 in. [No. 1294.] 
 
 In long double dress of white and red damask ; her right 
 hand rests on the edge of a table, and her left holds a 
 closed fan. 
 
 From the Palace of Dachau. Possibly by del Mazo, 
 
 HOLLAND. 
 
 MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM. 
 
 The Infante Don Baltazar Carlos. 
 MUSEUM, THE HAGUE. 
 
 The Infante Don Baltazar Carlos. 
 
 A Spanish Landscape. 
 
 ITALY. 
 
 PITTI PALACE, FLORENCE. 
 
 A Man. 3 ft. 11 in. x 2 ft. 10 in. [No. 198.] 
 Half-length figure wrapped in a cloak. 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain (1605-1665). 4 ft. 2 in. x 3 ft. 
 
 UFFIZI GALLERY, FLORENCE. 
 
 The Artist, said to be by Himself. [No. 216.] 
 
 A Similar Portrait. [No. 217.] 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain, on Horseback (i 605-1 665). 
 Canvas. Life-size. [No. 210.] 
 
 The three allegorical figures hovering above, and the 
 attendant bearing the helmet, are by another hand. 
 
HOLLAND ITALY RUSSIA 147 
 
 PALAZZO CATANAO, GENOA. 
 Madonna and Child. 
 
 BRERA GALLERY, MILAN. 
 
 A Dead Brother. Head only, on panel, i ft. 8 in. 
 X I ft. 3 in. [No. 320, Sala X.] 
 
 CAPITOL PICTURE GALLERY, ROME. 
 The Artist, when about thirty. [No. 80.] 
 
 See a long note as to this picture in Venturis s Catalogue. 
 
 PALAZZO DORIA, ROME. 
 
 Magnificent Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Painted 
 in Italy 1649-51. 
 
 PICTURE GALLERY, TURIN. 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain. Head only, i ft. 4 in. x i ft. i in. 
 [No. 320.] 
 
 Portrait of a Man. Head only. 2 ft. i in. x i ft. 6 in. 
 [No. 321.] 
 
 Acquired in 1865. 
 
 PALAZZO DUCALE, MODENA, 
 Portrait of the Duke of Modena. 
 
 RUSSIA. 
 
 HERMITAGE GALLERY, ST. PETERSBURG. 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain (1605-1665). 2 ft. 2 in. x i ft. 9 in. 
 [No. 420.] 
 
 Bust only, turned a little to the right, and looking at the 
 spectator. His dark dress has diamond buttons, and he 
 wears a white collar, over which is a golden chain. 
 
 From the Collection of Prince Demidoff San Donato, 
 
 Olivarez, Duke of San Lucar. 6 ft. 11 in. x 4 ft. 
 2 in. [No. 421.] 
 
 Standing near table covered in red ; left hand on his 
 sword, and right resting on the table. On his cloak is 
 embroidered the Cross of Alcantara. 
 
 Purchased from William II. of Holland, 
 
148 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 * Pope Innocent X. (15 74-1655). i ft. 7 in. x i ft. 4 in. 
 [No. 418.] 
 
 Bust, three-quarters, to the left, wearing a red soutane, and 
 also a red cape, on which is a white collar. 
 Walpole Collection, 
 
 Philip IV. of Spain (1605-1665). 6 ft. 9 in. >^4 ft. 
 [No. 419.] 
 
 The king is standing near a table, on which is a red 
 cover. He is dressed in black velvet, and wears the Order 
 of the Golden Fleece. 
 
 Purchased in iZ^o from William II . of Holland. 
 
 Olivarez, Duke of San Lucar. 2 ft. 3 in. x i ft. 10 in. 
 [No. 422.] 
 
 Bust only ; dressed in black, with white collar and black 
 cloak, on which is the Cross of Alcantara. 
 
 Similar to the portraits at Dresden^ Bowood, and belonging 
 to Sir Clare Ford. 
 
 Young Boy, Laughing. 10 in. x 8 in. [No. 423.] 
 
 Justi refuses to accept this picture as the work of 
 Velasquez. 
 
 A Young Spanish Prince. 6 ft. 9 in. x 4 ft. 8 in. 
 
 The prince, aged about six, is represented on a bay horse 
 galloping to the left. He wears the Order of the Golden 
 Fleece, and carries a baton in his hand. 
 
 SPAIN. 
 
 MUSEO DEL PRADO, MADRID.^ 
 
 From Mr. E. Kerr- Law son^s Catalogue of the Gallery, 
 
 *The Adoration of the Magi. 6 ft. 7 in. x 4 ft. i in. 
 [No. 1054.] 
 
 Mary, seated at the foot of an ancient construction, 
 presents the Infant to the adoration of the kings, two 
 of whom are presenting cups of gold, while the third awaits 
 his turn. To the left of the Virgin, somewhat in the 
 background, is St. Joseph. 
 
 Very early. Painted before Velasquez came to Court, 
 probably about the same time as the "Water Carrier." 
 
 The Saviour Crucified. 8 ft. i in. x 5 ft. 6 in. [No. 
 
 iThis gallery was re-arranged in June 1899 on the occasion of the 3rd centenary 
 celebrations. 
 
RUSSIA SPAIN 149 
 
 Presented in 1829 to Ferdinand VI I. by the Duke of 
 St. Ferdinand^ for this Museo. 
 
 *The Coronation of the Virgin. 5 ft. 8 in. x 4 ft. 4 in. 
 [No. 1056.] 
 
 Mary ascends on a throne of clouds to the seat of the 
 Holy Trinity ; the Father and Son, holding the crown be- 
 tween them, await the immaculate Virgin ; the Holy Spirit 
 in the form of a dove sheds rays of light which illuminate 
 the heavens. Figures less than life-size. 
 
 This picture was executed for the oratorio of the Queen in 
 the Royal Alcazar and Palace of Madrid. 
 
 *St. Anthony Visiting St. Paul. 8 ft. 5 in. x 9 ft. 4 in. 
 [No. 1057.] 
 
 Painted in 1659 for the Hermitage of St. Anthony of 
 the Buen Retiro. 
 
 *The Topers ; commonly called " Los Borrachos." 5 ft. 
 4 in. X 7 ft. 4 in. [No. 1058.] 
 
 The half-naked drunkard, who represents the god of the 
 vintage, seated on a cask, is crowning another drunkard 
 with ivy. Other intoxicated figures variously disposed. 
 
 Purchased by Philip /F., before Velasquez made his first 
 journey to Italy. 
 
 * The Forge of Vulcan. 7 ft. 3 in. x 9 ft. 5 in. 
 
 [No. 1059.] 
 
 The god Apollo appears in the forge of Vulcan, who, 
 with the help of four Cyclops, is fashioning a coat of mail, 
 and tells him of the adultery of his spouse Venus with 
 Mars. Painted in Italy. 
 
 Acquired for Philip IV. in 1634. 
 
 * The Surrender of Breda ; commonly called " Las 
 
 Lanzas." 10 ft. x 11 ft. 11 in. [No. 1060.] 
 
 General Justino de Nassau, in humble attitude, presents 
 the key to the victorious general, who with his hand on 
 the shoulder of the conquered soldier, addresses him in 
 flattering terms for his bravery. 
 
 It is believed that Velasquez painted this work about the 
 year 1647. 
 
 *Las Hilanderas (The Spinners) : Tapestry Manufactory 
 of St. Isabel of Madrid. 7 ft. 2 in. x 9 ft. 4 in. [No. 
 1061.] 
 
ISO CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 An old woman spins at a wheel while she turns to speak 
 to a young woman at her side, standing by a red curtain. 
 Other figures in the background carding the wool, etc. 
 
 Decorated tJie Palace of the Buen Retiro. 
 
 *Las Meninas; formerly called "The Family." lo ft. 
 4 in. X 8 ft. II in. [No. 1062.] 
 
 Velasquez is executing the portraits of Philip IV. and 
 his second wife Mariana of Austria, who are seen reflected 
 in a mirror situated at the back of the studio. The child 
 Infanta Margarita Maria is attended by her Meninas^ Maria 
 Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco, the latter 
 supplying her with a vessel of water, and the former stand- 
 ing on the left of Maria. The dwarfs, Mari Bdrbola and 
 Nicolasito Pertusato, occupy the corner on the right, the 
 latter with his foot resting on a large dog. 
 
 Collection of Philip /F., Royal Palace of Madrid, 
 
 * Mercury and Argus. 4 ft. i in. x 8 ft. i in. [No. 1063.] 
 
 Mercury having caused Argus, the guardian of the cow 
 lo, to fall asleep, cuts off the head of the animal. 
 Collection of Philip /F., Royal Alcazar of Madrid. 
 
 King Philip III. on Horseback. 9 ft. 9 in. x 10 ft. 2 in. 
 [No. 1064.] 
 
 Some parts of the person of this portrait seem hardly 
 to be the work of Velasquez, but rather that of Pantajo, 
 or of Bartolom^Gonzalez. 
 
 Queen Margarita of Austria, Wife of Philip III. 
 9 ft. 8 in. X 10 ft. [No. 1065.] 
 
 The queen is mounted on a beautiful chestnut and white 
 horse. She is dressed in a black costume, with open 
 sleeves bordered with silver. Of this picture Velasquez 
 painted scarcely more than the horse, the background, 
 and some accessories. 
 
 Collection of Philip IV., Palace of the Buen Retiro. 
 
 * King Philip IV. on Horseback. 9 ft. 9 in. x 10 ft. 2 in. 
 
 [No. 1066.] 
 
 The king is seen almost in profile; clothed in half- 
 armour of burnished steel, ornamented with gold. He 
 holds the sceptre in his right hand. The horse is slightly 
 rearing. 
 
 Collection of Philip IV., Palace of the Buen Retiro, 
 
SPAIN 151 
 
 Isabel of Bourbon, Second Wife of Philip IV. 9 ft. 
 9 in. X 10 ft. 2 in. [No. 1067.] 
 
 Mounted on a white palfrey. 
 
 Collection of Philip /K, Palace of the Buen Retiro. 
 
 * Prince Don Baltazar Carlos. 6 ft. 9 in. x 5 ft. 7 in. 
 
 [No. 1068.] 
 
 Represents a child of six or seven years, mounted on 
 a spirited Andalusian pony, which is on the gallop. 
 A small dull copy still exists in the Dulwich Gallery. 
 Collection of Philip /K, Palace of the Buen Retiro. 
 
 * The Count-Duke d'Olivarez. 10 ft. 2 in. x 7 ft. 9 in. 
 
 [No. 1069.] 
 
 With a plate-breast of burnished steel and gold orna- 
 mentation, mounted on a spirited sorrel horse; holding 
 in his right hand the generaPs baton. 
 
 This canvas passed from the House of Guzman to that 
 of the Marques de la Ensenada, from whom it was acquired 
 by King Charles III., and in whose collection in the New 
 Palace it figured in 1772. 
 
 * El Infante Don Carlos. 6 ft. 6 in. x 3 ft. 3 in. [No. 
 
 1070.] 
 
 A young man, standing. 
 
 Collection of Philip /K, Palace of the Buen Retiro, 
 
 * Philip IV. i ft. 10 in. x i ft. 5 in. [No. 1071.] 
 
 Representing a young man of eighteen or nineteen years, 
 in steel armour adorned with gold. Extended bust ; 
 life-size. 
 
 Earliest known portrait of the king. Justi thinks the 
 armour and red scarf added at a later date by Velasquez. 
 
 * Dona Maria, Queen of Hungary, Sister of Philip 
 IV. (?). I ft 10 in. X I ft. 5 in. [No. 1072.] 
 
 Represented about twenty-five years of age. 
 
 She married Ferdinand of Hungary, and was painted, after 
 her marriage, by Velasquez, at Naples. She had been 
 betrothed in 1623 to Charles Prince of Wales. 
 
 Don Carlos, Second Son of King Philip III. 6 ft. 
 9 in. X 4 ft. I in. [No. 1073.] 
 
 * King Philip IV. 6 ft. 2 in. x 4 ft. i in. [No. 1074.] 
 
 As sportsman, with a gun in his right hand. At liis 
 side is a hound. 
 
152 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 One of three portraits, alike in size, and shape of the king, 
 his brother Ferdinand, and his son Balthazar, dressed in 
 shooting costume. 
 
 Collection of Charles 11.^ Royal Alcazar and Palace of 
 Madrid. 
 
 Infante Don Fernando of Austria, Brother of 
 Philip IV. 6 ft. 2 in. x 6 ft. 4 in. [No. 1075.] 
 
 Standing in a field, in hunting costume with a gun 
 in his hands. At his side a beautiful cinnamon-coloured 
 hound. 
 
 Collection of Charles II. in 1686. 
 
 Don Baltazar Carlos, at Six Years of Age. 6 ft. 2 in. 
 X 3 ft. 4 in. [No. 1076.] 
 
 Standing, in hunting costume, and holding his gun, which 
 rests on the ground. At one side a large setter, and 
 on the other a greyhound. 
 
 King Philip IV., of about Fifty Years of Age. 
 7 ft. 6 in. X 4 ft. 3 in. [No. 1077.] 
 
 Standing, in half-armour, with the sceptre in his hand, 
 and a stout lion at his feet. 
 
 Came from the Escorial to this Museum in 1845. 
 
 * Dona Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. 
 6 ft. 9 in. X 4 ft. I in. [No. 1078.] 
 
 Her right hand rests on the back of an easy-chair, while 
 the left falls naturally. She is dressed in black silk. 
 
 Collection of Charles 11.^ Palace of the Retiro {?). Came 
 from the Escorial in 1845. 
 
 Dona Mariana of Austria. 7 ft. 6 in. x 4 ft. 3 in. 
 [No. 1079.] 
 
 Repetition of No. 1078, with variation in the disposition 
 of the curtain. 
 
 King Philip IV., at an Advanced Age. Life-sized bust. 
 
 2 ft. 3 in. X I ft. 10 in. [No. 1080.] 
 Philip IV., in Prayer. 6 ft. 9 in. x 4 ft. 9 in. [No. 1081.] 
 
 Kneeling, with his hat in his left hand ; dressed in black. 
 Entire figure. 
 
 From the Royal Monastery of the Escorial. 
 
 Dona Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. 
 in Prayer. 6 ft. 9 in. x 4 ft. 9 in. [No. 1082.] 
 
SPAIN 153 
 
 Kneeling, with her two hands on the cushion, and in 
 them a prayer-book. 
 
 Companion to and from the same source as the preceding 
 picture. 
 
 Don Baltazar Carlos, Son of Philip IV. 6 ft. 9 in. 
 X4 ft. 8 in. [No. 1083.] 
 
 A youth, of some fourteen years, standing. 
 Collection of Charles 11.^ Palace of the Buen Re tiro. 
 
 Maria Teresa of Austria, Daughter of Philip IV., 
 
 AFTERWARDS QUEEN OF FRANCE. 6 ft. lO in. X 4 ft. 9 in. 
 
 [No. 1084.] 
 
 Apparently of about ten years of age. Standing, with 
 a rose in her left hand, and a fine cambric handkerchief 
 in her right. Full-length ; life-size. 
 
 Saved fro?n the fire of the old Alcazar in 1734. 
 
 Don Luis de Gongoro of Argote, Cordovan Poet. 
 Life-sized bust, i ft. ii in. x i ft. 6 in. [No. 1085.] 
 
 *Dona Juana Pacheco, Wife of Velasquez. 2 ft. 
 X I ft. 7 in. [No. 1086.] 
 
 Life-sized bust, with part of the left hand. 
 
 Sometimes called " The Sybil." 
 
 Collection of Isabel Fame se^ Palace of San Ildefonso, 
 
 Daughter of Velasquez, Infant Girl. Half-figure; 
 life-size, i ft. 10 in. x i ft. 6 in. [No. 1087.] 
 
 There is no certainty that this represents either Francisca 
 or Ignatia, the two daughters of Velasquez. There is 
 another canvas, however, in the Prado, very like this one, 
 and the two may be portraits of the two sisters. 
 
 Infant Girl, i ft. 11 in. x i ft. 6 in. [No. 1088.] 
 
 Apparently a sister of the child represented in the pre- 
 ceding canvas. Half-figure ; life-size. 
 
 Elderly Lady. 3 ft. 5 in. x 2 ft. 6 in. [No. 1089.] 
 
 Half-figure ; life-size. The authenticity of this work 
 is very doubtful. 
 Saved from the fire of the old Castle in 1734. 
 
 Don Antonio Alonso Pimentel, Ninth Earl (Conde) 
 of Benavente, Lord of the Bedchamber of Philip 
 IV. 3 ft. 6 in. X 2 ft. 10 in. [No. 1090.] 
 
 Collection of Isabel Farnese, Palace of San Ildefonso. 
 
IS4 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 * The Sculptor Martinez Montanes. 3 ft. 6 in. x 2 ft. 
 
 10 in. [No. 1091.] 
 
 Erroneously supposed to be Alonso Cano ; represented 
 modelling a bust of Philip IV. Half-length ; unfinished. 
 
 *Pablillos de Valladolid, a Buffoon of Philip IV. 
 6 ft. 9 in. X 4 ft. [No. 1092.] 
 
 Life-sized figure. His name is mentioned in company 
 with those of Cristobel de Pernia, and other Jesters or 
 Players. 
 
 Collection of Philip /F., Palace of the Buen Retiro. 
 
 * Cristobal de Pernia, called Babarroja. 6 ft. 5 in. 
 
 X 3 ft. II in. [No. 1093.] 
 
 Full-length figure ; unfinished. Pernia in the character 
 and costume of a Moorish Corsair. 
 
 Collection of Charles IL^ Palace of the Buen Retiro. 
 
 A Juggler of Philip IV., named Don Juan de Austria. 
 6 ft. 10 in. X 4 ft. [No. 1094.] 
 
 A life-sized figure, standing. In the background is seen 
 the sea, with a blazing ship. 
 
 Collection of Philip IV. and Charles Il.y Palace of the 
 Buen Retiro. 
 
 * The Dwarf El Primo. 3 ft. 6 in. x 2 ft. 8 in. [No. 
 
 I095-] 
 
 Seated on a stone in the middle of a desert and 
 mountainous field, with a large slouch hat on his head. 
 
 The head and books, according to Justi, belong to an 
 earlier period than the background, which was painted 
 probably over an interior. 
 
 Collection of Philip IV,, Royal Castle and Palace of 
 Madrid. 
 
 The Dwarf Don Sebastian de Morra (?). 3 ft. 5 in. 
 X 2 ft. 8 in. [No. 1096.] 
 
 Seated on the floor. Figure life-size. 
 From the same source as No. 1095. 
 
 *The Dwarf Antonio the Englishman (?). 4 ft. 7 in. 
 X 3 ft. 5 in. [No. 1097.] 
 
 At his side a mastiff bitch, and in his right hand, which 
 falls naturally, he holds his slouch hat adorned with plumes. 
 Full-length figure, and of life-size. 
 
 Collection of Charles 11.^ Torre de la Parada (?). 
 
SPAIN ISS 
 
 * El Nino de Valle^as. 3 ft. 6 in. x 2 ft. 8 in. [No. 
 1098.] 
 
 In a field, bareheaded, and with a pack of cards in his 
 hands. Life-size. 
 
 Collection of Charles 11.^ Torre de la Parada (?). 
 
 El Bobo de Coria. 3 ft. 4 in. x 2 ft. 8 in. [No. 1099.] 
 
 Seated on a stone, with a gourd at either side, and his 
 hands upon his right knee. Entire figure ; life-size. 
 
 This picture decorated the Torre de la Parada till the 
 time of Charles III. The subject of the picture was no 
 doubt one of the many Court fools or hombres de placer of 
 Philip IV. 
 
 *^sop. 4 ft. 10 in. X 3 ft. [No. 1 100.] 
 
 Standing in the middle of a dismantled room. Entire 
 figure. 
 
 Collection of Philip IV., Torre de la Parada. 
 
 *MoENiPPUS. 5 ft. 10 in. X 3 ft. [No. iioi.] 
 
 Standing in a disgarnished room, with books and a 
 parchment at his feet. Enveloped in a black cloak. Entire 
 figure. 
 
 Collection of Charles 11, Torre de la Parada. 
 
 *The God Mars. 5 ft. 10 in. x 3 ft. i in. [No. iio2,J 
 
 Seated on the edge of a bed, with his left foot on a 
 pine footstool, his left elbow resting on his knee, and 
 his cheek upon his hand ; nude, with the exception of 
 a blue drapery across the body, and a rose-coloured cloak 
 thrown over shoulders. 
 
 One of the few nudes of Velasquez ; it hung in the Torre 
 de la Parada. It seems little later than the "Vulcan," 
 perhaps just before the " Christ at the Pillar." 
 
 Collection of Philip IV., Royal Castle 'and Palace of 
 Madrid, or Torre de la Parada. 
 
 A Man. Life-sized bust. i ft. 3 in. x i ft. 2 in. [No. 
 1 103.] 
 
 Collection of Philip V., Palace of San Ildefonso, 
 
 A Man. Life-sized bust, i ft. 10 in. x i ft. 3 in. [No. 
 1104.] 
 
 Alonso Martinez de Espinar, Valet-de-Chambre of 
 Prince Baltazar Carlos. 2 ft. 5 in. x i ft. 5 in. 
 [No. 1 105.] 
 
156 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 Dressed in black. Life-sized bust. 
 
 Collection of Isabel Farnese^ Palace of San Ildefonso, 
 
 *ViEW IN THE Garden of the Villa Medici at Rome 
 I ft. 5 in. X I ft. 3 in. [No. iio6.] 
 
 Taken during the two months which Velasquez spent at 
 the Villa Medici on his first visit to Italy. 
 
 Collection of Philip IV., Royal Alcazar and Palace of 
 Madrid. 
 
 ^ View in the Garden of Aranjuez. i ft, 5 in, x i ft. 
 3 in. [No. 1 107.] 
 
 Companion to and from the sa7ne source as No. 1 106. 
 
 View of the Arch of Titus in the Compo Vaccino of 
 Rome. 4 ft. 10 in. x 3 ft. 7 in. [No. 11 08.] 
 
 Taken in the Via Sacra. 
 
 Painted probably in Madrid from some note made in 
 Rome while Velasquez was on his first visit to Italy. 
 
 View of the Fountain of the Tritons in the Garden 
 of the Island of Aranjuez. 8 ft. i in. x 7 ft. 3 in. 
 [No. 1109.] 
 
 // is believed that Velasquez painted this picture^ or at 
 least made the studies for it, in the year 1642, during 
 Philip IV.^s journey to Saragossa. 
 
 View of the Calle de la Reina, in Aranjuez. 7 ft. 
 II in. X 6 ft. 7 in. [No. mo.] 
 
 Probably executed about the same time as No. 11 09, that 
 is, in 1642. 
 
 View of the Buen Retiro, as it appeared in the Time 
 OF Philip IV. 4 ft. 9 in. x 3 ft. 8 in. [No. 11 11.] 
 
 View of a Royal Residence. 4 ft. 10 in. x 3 ft. 7 in. 
 [No. 1 1 12.] 
 
 Possibly the old Alcazar and Palace of Madrid, from the 
 garden of the emperors or of the prioress. 
 
 Study of Landscape and Perspective. 4 ft. 10 in. x 3 ft. 
 7 in. [No. 1113.] 
 
 In the heavens the god Mercury is clearing the air with 
 the caduceus in his hand ; in the lower part of the picture, 
 other figures. 
 
SPAIN 157 
 
 Study of Landscape and Perspective. 4 ft. 10 in. 
 X 3 ft. 7 in. [No. 1 1 14.] 
 
 Saved from the fire of the old Alcazar of Madrid in 1734. 
 
 Study of the Head of an old Man. i ft. 3 in. x i ft. 
 [No. 1 1 15.] 
 
 Life-size. Authenticity doubtful. 
 
 Collection of Philip K, Palace of San Ildefonso. 
 
 Portrait of Prince Balthazar Carlos, aged six, stand- 
 ing bareheaded in a room opening on to a balcony with 
 balustrade. 
 
 ROYAL PALACE, MADRID. 
 
 The Aquador of Seville. 
 
 Attributed to Velasquez. 
 
 Replica of the Duke of Wellingtoti s picture. 
 
 Three other pictures in this gallery are : 
 
 1. The Head of a Woman. 
 
 2. A Hand holding a Paper (part of a lost picture). 
 
 3. A Small Portrait of Olivarez. 
 
 THE ESCORIAL, MADRID. 
 
 Joseph's Brethren showing his Blood-Stained Coat. 
 Painted at Rome in 1630. 
 
 SENOR LEANDRO ALVEAR. 
 The Grape-Gatherer. 
 
 SENOR AURELIANO DE BERUETE. 
 St. Peter. 
 
 THE DUKE OF MEDINA CELLI, MADRID. 
 A Woman. 
 
1 58 CATALOGUE OF WORKS 
 
 THE DUKE OF VILLA HERMOSA. 
 
 Portrait of Don Diego del Corral y Arellano. 
 
 THE DUKE OF ALBA, LIRIA PALACE, MADRIL 
 Dona Antonia, Daughter of Don Luis de Hard. 
 
 The Infanta Margarita Teresa. 
 
 ARCHBISHOP'S PALACE, SEVILLE. 
 
 The Virgin presenting the Chasuble to St. Ildefonse 
 
 DONA MARIA DEL VALLE GOURALEZ (veuve dc 
 GARZON). 
 
 Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus. 
 
 THE MUSEUM, VALENCIA. 
 
 The Portrait of the Artist. 
 See engraving by Fortuny, 
 
 SWEDEN. 
 THE PALACE, GRYPSHOLM. 
 
 Philip IV. as a Youth. 
 
 A gift from Pimental, the Spanish Ambassador, to 
 Queen Christina. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Admiral Pulido^ 20, 25 
 Adoration of the Magiy 19, 53 
 Aisop^ 20, 21, 23, 48, 53, 86, 91 
 Anne of Austria, 12, 13 
 I Antonio el Inglese^ 91 
 
 Avenue of the Queen^ 60, 93 
 
 IJulthazar-Carlos, the King's son, 
 
 15; dies, 16; portrait, 20, 21 
 Inmr-Hunt^ They 20 
 /^Mj/ <2/^ Philip in Armour, 19 
 I 
 
 ' Cano, Alenzo, 16; portrait, 17 
 Carducho, Court-painter, 11, 113 
 Caxesi, Eugenio, 1 1 ; compared 
 
 with Velasquez, 27 
 Chevreuse, Madame de, portrait 
 painted by Velas(iuez, lo 
 I Christ at the Pillar^ 20, 71 
 
 Collier, John, on the technique of 
 
 art, 107 
 Coronation of the Virgin, 57 
 Corot, similarity of Velasquez 
 
 to Whistler and, 60, iii 
 Crucifixion, The, 20, 80 
 
 Don- Carlos, see Balthasar- Carlos 
 Duran, as a teacher of art, 104, 
 105, 107, 108 ; on art, io<5 ; on 
 artists, 109; on colouring, no 
 
 Expulsion of the Moriscoes by 
 Philip III., IS 
 
 " rs^e of Vulcan, 14, 19, 49, 53, 71 
 untain of the Tritons, 61 ; Carlo 
 Justi on, 61 
 
 Gonzales, Court-painter, il 
 Greco, influenced Velasquez, 98 
 
 Hcnner, the painter, iii 
 
 Ilerrera, Francisco de, taught Velas- 
 quez, 10 
 
 Hilanderas, Las, 20, 21, 23, 53, 
 57-59, 71, 72, 88, 89, 92 
 
 159 
 
 Impressionistic Painting, 120-125 
 Innocent X., portrait, 17, 20 
 Isabella de Bourbon, 12 
 Italy, Velasquez visits, 14, 17 
 
 JosepKs Coat, 14 
 
 Justi, Carlo, on Velasquez, 9, 61 ; 
 
 on the Fountain of the Tritons, 
 
 61 
 
 King as a Sportsman, 20 
 
 Landscapes of Velasquez, 61 
 Lavery, John, on Velasquez, 95, 96 
 Leonardo, on modelling, 76 ; on 
 the technique of art, 106 
 
 Maria Teresa, Birth of, 15 
 
 Maria Teresa, 20, 23, 53, 54, 71, 
 
 84, 89-92 
 Mary of Hungary, portrait painted 
 
 by Velasquez, 14 
 Mary Tudor, portrait by Antonio 
 
 More, 99, 100 
 Mazo, J. B. del, 91 
 Meninas, Las, 20, 21, 23, 24, 28, 
 
 3i32,45. 50-53,57-59, 71,78, 
 
 86-88 
 Modelling of Velasquez's pictures, 
 
 compared, 74, 75 ; Leonardo 
 
 on, 76 
 Modena, Duke of, portrait painted 
 
 by Velasquez, 16 
 Moenippus, 20, 21, 23, 48, 53, 70, 
 
 71, 86, 91, 93 
 Michael Angelo and his Art, 113, 
 
 114 
 Millet, III 
 Montanez, Martinez, 16 ; portrait, 
 
 20, 21, 25, 85, 92 
 Murillo, pupil of Velasquez, 16 
 
 Nardi, Court-painter, ll 
 
 Old Masters, Velasquez compared 
 with, 97, 98 
 
i6o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Olivarez, Count, ii, 12, ; disgraced, 
 15, 16; portrait, 20, 21, 54, 92 
 
 Pablillos de Valladolid, 20 
 
 Pacheco, Francisco, taught Velas- 
 quez, 10, 11; his daughter 
 marries Velasquez, 1 1 
 
 Painting, styles of, 42-45 
 
 Pelouse, Leon, 115, 116 
 
 Perspective, objects seen in, 116, 
 117 
 
 Philip III., dies, 11 
 
 Philip IV. , 7 ; Velasquez and, 7, 
 13 ; his brothers, 12 ; portraits 
 painted by Velasquez, 16, 19, 
 20, 21, 46, 54, 80, 81, 84, 85, 
 
 Portrait-painting, 6 
 Prince Ferdinand, 20 
 
 Queen Mariana, 20 
 
 Quevedo, portrait by Velasquez, 17 
 
 Raphael, not admired by Velas- 
 quez, 98 
 
 Realistic Painting, on, 121, 122 
 
 Repulse of the English at Cadizy 
 Caxesi's pictu/e, 15, 27 
 
 Ribera, Velasquez and, 14, 17 
 
 Riding School, The, 20 
 
 Rubens, at the Court of Spain, 13 ; 
 and Velasquez, 13, 14 ; com- 
 pared with Velasquez, 27, 51 
 
 Seville, Velasquez born at, 10 
 
 Shepherds, The, 19 
 
 Silva, Diego Rodriguez de, grand- 
 father of Velasquez, 10 
 
 Silva, Juan de, father of Velasquez, 
 10 
 
 Spain, scenery in, 4, 5 
 
 Surrender of Breda, 15, 19-21, 23- 
 27, 29, 54 
 
 Technique in Art, 34, 35 
 
 Titian, his Assumption, 52, 53 ; 
 Velasquez's admiration of, 98, 
 99 ; his Francois Premier, 100 
 
 Topers, The, 19, 29, 31, 48, 53; 
 and Las Meninas compared, 79 
 
 Velasquez, not appreciated, 23 ; 
 Philip IV. and, 7, 13; as a 
 painter, 7, 8 ; Carl Justi's work 
 on, 9; born at Seville, 10; 
 date of birth, 10; his grand- 
 father, 10; his father, 10; his 
 first master, 10; pupil of Fran- 
 cisco Pacheco, 10 ; marries, 11 ; 
 appointed Court-painter, 1 1 ; 
 and Rubens, 13, 14 ; visits 
 Italy, 14, 17; taught Murillo, 
 16 ; his friends, 16 ; Court 
 honours for, 17 ; his death, 18 ; 
 his pictures, 19,20; his style, 
 21, 32 ; compared with Caxesi, 
 27; compared with Rubens; 
 27, 51 ; method of painting, 
 42-46 ; his style and Whistler's, 
 48 ; his impressionistic com- 
 positions, 53 ; his realistic 
 compositions, 53 ; his similarity 
 to Corot and Whistler, 60 ; his 
 landscapes, 61 ; modelling of 
 his pictures compared, 74, 75 ; 
 an impressionist, *]%^ 79, iii, 
 125 ; his ensemble, 81 ; his art, 
 82, 83 ; his portraits of Philip 
 IV. , 84, 85 ; John Lavery on, 
 95 96 ; and old masters com- 
 pared, 97, 98; influenced by 
 Greco, 98 ; admiration of Ti- 
 tian, 98, 99 ; does not admire 
 Raphael, 98 ; writers on, 103 ; 
 Sir David Wilkie on, 103 ; and 
 modern artists, 103, 104, lli; 
 a realistic painter, 107 
 
 Venus, 21, 53, 71 
 
 Water Carrier, The, 19 
 
 Whistler, similarity between Velas- 
 quez and, 48, 60 ; his pictures, 
 112 
 
 Wilkie, Sir David, on Velasquez, 
 103 
 
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