LIBRARY OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE
BEaUEST OF ALICE CHENEY BALTZELL
a
THE ART OF VELASQUEZ.
505 Copies only of this Edition have BEEN Printed, of which this is No. 101
London : York St., Covent Garden AND New York : 66, Fifth Avenue Cambridge : Deighton, Bell & Co.
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S05 Copies only of this Edition have BEEN Printed, of which this is No. 101
London : York St., Covent Garden AND New York : 66, Fifth Avenue Cambridge : Deighton, Bell & Co.
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THE ART
OF
VELASQUEZ
BY
R. A. M. STEVENSON
LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1895
MP
Bequest (rt Alice Cheney Baltzell
CHISWICK PRESS: — CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
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CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
The Importance of Velasquez in the History of Painting i
PART I.
Chapter I. His Surroundings in Spain ; his Position at the
Court of Philip IV. . . . • • 5
II. Periods of his Life and Work . . . . i?
III. Comparison of the Three Stages of his Art . 29
PART II.
IV. The Dignity of Technique . . • • 37 V. The Composition of Velasquez . . ■ • 59
VI. His Colour .69
VII. His Modelling and Brushwork . . .81
PART III.
VIII. Notes on some of his Pictures . . . ■9'^
IX. His Influence upon recent Art . . ,101
X. The Lesson of Impressionism . . . .111
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PHOTOGRAVURES.
Venus. Latest Period. Reproduced from the original painting by kind permission of Mrs. Morritt, of Rokeby Park . . Frontispiece
Don Carlos, Brother of Philip IV. {Prado.) First Period
The Topers. {Prado.) First Period. Date 1629 .
Philip IV. Young. {Prado.) First Period ....
Fountain of the Tritons. {Prado.) Second Period ? .
Philip IV. on Horseback. {Prado.) Middle Period
Don Ferdinand, Brother of Philip IV. {Prado.) Middle Period
Don Balthasar Carlos, Son of Philip IV. {Prado.) Middle Period
The Surrender of Breda. {Prado.) Middle Period .
El Conde — DuQUE de Olivarez. {Prado.) Middle Period .
The Forge of Vulcan. {Prado.) Circa 1630 ....
Las Meninas. Reproduced from the original study in oils by kind per mission of Ralph Bankes, Esq., of Kingston Lacy
The Coronation of the Virgin. {Prado.) Latest Period .
Philip IV. Praying. {Prado.) Latest Period ? . . . .
Mariana of Austria, Second Wife of Philip IV. Latest Period
Maria Teresa. {Prado.) Latest Period
Moenippus. {Prado.) Latest Period
Head from " ^Esop." {Prado.) Latest Period ....
La Hilanderas, or The Spinners. {Prado.) Latest Period
Philip IV. Old. {Prado.) Latest Period
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24
70
56
42
12
100
8
5
48
22
68
110
14 86 82 88 84 76
[Continued cruerleaf.
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APPENDIX OF ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS.
HALF-TONE BLOCKS.
I. The Adoration of the Magi. {Prado.) Early Style, 1619. II. The Shepherds. (^National Gallery.) Early Style.
III. Philip IV. Young. {Prado) Early Style. Circa 1623-4.
IV. Daughter of Velasquez (so-called). {Prado.) 1626. V. Philip IV. {Prado.) Early Style.
VI. DoRa Maria, Daughter of Philip III. {Prado.) Circa 1630. VII. View in the Garden of the Villa Medici, Rome. {Prado.) Circa 1630. VIII. View in the Garden of the Villa Medici, Rome. {Prado.) Circa 1630. IX. Philip IV. as a Sportsman. {Prado). Middle Period. X. The Admiral Adrian Pulido Pareja. {National Gallery.) Middle
Period, 1639. XI. The Crucifixion. {Prado.) Middle Period, 1639. XII. Christ at the Pillar. {National Gallery.) Middle Period.
XIII. Isabel de Borbon, First Wife of Philip IV. {Prado.) Middle
Period. The dress is not by Velasquex.
XIV. Le Reconte or Conversation. {Louvre.) Middle Period ?
XV. Philip III. {Prado.) Partly repainted by Velasquez in Middle Period upon an earlier work by B. Gonzalez. XVI. Margarita of Austria, Wife of Philip III. {Prado) Only the
horse and background by Velasquez in Middle Period. XVII. The Dwarf "El Primo." {Prado) Middle Period, 1644. XVIII. Equestrian Portrait of Don Balthazar Carlos. {Prado.) Middle Period. XIX. Orlando. {National Gallery) Doubtful. Middle Period ?
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XX. Don Pedro de Altamira. {Louvre.) Middle Period, 1633. XXI. Count de Benavente. {Prado.) Middle Period. XXII. The Sculptor Martinez MontaSes, once called Alonso Cano. {Prado.) Middle Period.
XXIII. Pablillos de Valladolid, called a Buffoon, an Actor, and a
Rhetor. {Prado) Middle Period.
XXIV. Philip IV., called the Fraga Portrait. {Dulwich Gallery.)
Middle Period, 1644. XXV. Dona Juan Pacheco. {Prado.) 1686. XXVI. Portrait — Unknown Man. {Prado.) Middle Period. XXVII. A Betrothal. {National Gallery.) Late Middle Style. XXVIII. Mercury and Argos. {Prado.) Late Style ? Middle Period ? XXIX. A Buffoon called " Don Juan de Austria." {Prado.) Late
Style. XXX. Pope Innocent X. Circa 1650. XXXI. The God Mars. {Prado.) Late Style.
XXXII. The Dwarf, "El Bobo de Coria," an Idiot. {Prado.) Middle Period .'' (Catalogue.) Late Style (Justi).
XXXIII. The Dwarf Sebastian de Morra. {Prado.)
XXXIV. Cristobal de Pernia, called " Babarroja." {Prado.) Late
Style. XXXV. Mariana DE Austria, Second Wife OF Philip IV. {Prado.) Late
Style. XXXVI. Mariana de Austria at Prayers. {Prado.) Late Style. XXXVII. xMoENiPPUS. {Prado.) Late Style. XXXVIII. ^sopus. {Prado.) Late Style. XXXIX. Las Meninas, also called " La Familia." {Prado.) Late Style, 1656. XL. The Dwarf called Antonio el Inglese. {Prado.) Late Style. XLI. Philip IV. Old. {National Gallery.) Late Style. XLII. St. Anthony visiting St. Paul. {Prado.) Late Style. XLIII. La Infanta Dona Margarita Maria. {Louvre.) Late Style. Circa 1659.
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THE ART OF VELASQUEZ
INTRODUCTION
WHEN one speaks of Velasquez, it must be remembered that his influence upon art is still young. His genius slumbered for two hundred years, till the sympathy of one or two great artists broke the spell and showed us the true enchanter of realism, shaping himself from a cloud of misappre- hension. The importance and the comparative novelty of the subjeft may excuse these few notes, taken during a visit to Madrid. For it will be allowed that Italy still draws the mass of pifture-lovers. Hundreds of writers, sitting at home, dired: the pilgrimages of thousands of travellers amidst the nicest details of Italian galleries. Every day sees some new book or paper on the Raphaehtes, pre-Raphaelites, or Venetians. You enter the Uflizi 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
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no other Englishman. The great gallery has not yet been described and criticised in English more than it deserves. Now people like to attach a ready-made sentiment to a picture ; they hate to form their own judgment, and to wait till a canvas speaks to them in its own language. The true efFed: of art is slow. A pidure is a quiet companion of your leisure, whose mood you learn to accept without heated contro- versy; one of those quiet figures, in fadt, who sit and smoke opposite you, till you seem to exchange thoughts with them by something like mental trans- ference. If you must rush this intimacy in a public gallery, you should look at a pidlure as you would at a mesmeriser, with your head empty and all your life in your eyes. But the hurried visitor sins from over-eagerness. He is fluttered by anticipation of the many things to come, and will not abandon him- self to what is actually before his eyes. He will not wait; he prefers to bustle up his acquaintance with a canvas by means of the formal introdudfion of some one whom he regards as an habitue of pidture-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 subjeft. Some one with time and opportunity, I hope, may take my notes into account, in a thorough investigation of Velasquez, from the point of view of modern art. As yet few but painters enjoy Velasquez, or rightly estimate his true position in the history of art. Not much is known about him.
Contempt, not to say oblivion, fell on the man who pre- conceived the spirit of our own day. Amongst notable prophets of the new and true — Rubens, Rembrandt, Claude — he was the newest, and certainly the truest, from our point of view ; so new and so true, indeed, that two hundred years after he had shown the mystery of light as God made it, we still hear that Velasquez was a sordid soul who never saw beauty, a mere master of technique, wholly lacking in imagination. So say those whose necks are stiff with looking at Italy and Raphael. Delacroix ' complains of them, in his Letters, that they see beauty only in lines, and therefore refuse to believe that others may receive a different kind of impression. The opinion of these people is not to be controverted by words alone, and, as nature is a hard teacher, a student may save himself trouble by studying Velasquez at Madrid. A man of genius learns from a mere hint, it is true, and such an one without going further than Paris or London may understand how Velasquez saw the world: a more ordinary eye, how- ever, must take the Spaniard's greatness half on trust, if he has not seen Madrid. But with the best will in the world some eyes really cannot see the side of nature that Velasquez saw ; while others are so bandaged by Italian prejudice that they may save themselves the trouble of a journey.
* " Ce fameux beau que les uns voient dans la ligne serpentine, les autres dans la ligne droite, ils se sont tous obstine a ne le voir que dans les lignes. Je suis a ma fenetre et je vols le plus beau paysage : I'idee d'une ligne ne me vient pas a I'esprit."
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CHAPTER I.
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 pidlures. This provides a fitting overture to the long array of his works which awaits you in the Prado. But in itself no country offers a more beautiful landscape than Spain, and none that I have seen provides a more desirable setting for figures, horses, and other piduresque 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 the 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 interest- ing forms with which it is furnished are at once simple and piquant. A clear, deHcate atmosphere, penetrated with a flood of light, softens every definition, and fuses every local tint without blotting it, as in our own foggy island. No local hue appears as if gummed
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like a wafer against the universal grey paper of every- thing that is not quite close at hand ; nor do the masses of objedls look like thin, unmodelled side- scenes against an obliterated distance. Things of the liveliest tint sink into the coloured whole, owning, by their lit side as by their shadowed, the federating power of real light. Great parts of Spain resemble pid:orially 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 adlive sport of clouds in this stormier region of Spain. Indeed, the country of Velasquez seems the very place in which to study values, in which to discover and to develop im- pressionism. On the way to Toledo I saw the sierras, just as Velasquez often painted them, of a powerful blue streaked with stretches of snow, and looking out from an agitated sky full of rifted clouds of a dirty white colour. For Spain is by no means always bright and gay, though always atmospheric and profound.
In this country external nature favoured the painter both by landscape and by picturesque figure ; but the inner condition of the people scarcely answered the demands of the historian, who makes art flourish only with freedom and public enterprise. Where was the growing commerce, the expanding institutions, or the religious liberty in the shrinking, priest-ridden Spain of the seventeenth century ? As Mr. Whistler says, the growth of art is sporadic, and to affed: the mind of one man it is not necessary to postulate the conflid: of nations and all the mighty epoch-making machinery of history. Genius is concodied by the momentary
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accidental commerce of a man and woman, and fostered by a voyage, a visit, or communion with a half-dozen of friends. Commercial demand may encourage trade painting, and princely patronage palatial decoration ; but who shall say what encourages genius — that com- pound of original seeing, intelledual courage, and some gift or other of expression ?
Is it encouraging to be a portrait painter, to undergo the interested but ignorant criticism of the sitter, to dis- regard times and seasons, the disposition of the moment and the beckonings of the spirit, and to jump at no obstacle that you cannot clear in your habitual stride ? Is it encouraging to live in a sinking country, and be the painter of a bigoted and fantastically ceremonious court? Yet, in spite of such poor encouragement, Velasquez became the boldest and most independent of painters. But is there no qualifying circumstance ? May not the picture of this life be a transparency that changes when you hold it up to the light.'' Many old men, reared in the puritanical and hypocritical Edinburgh of the past, could tell you the private, readlionary effe6l of that life of repression and humbug upon a decent, genuine man. That you may not think at all, or ad: for yourself, is to add the very zest of piracy to experiment in life and origi- nality in thought. Where public profession is mani- festly a lie, and public manners a formal exaggeration, life becomes a chest with a false bottom, which opens into a refuge for the kindlier, wiser, and more ardent among human beings. As much as Spain, the court, and the priest, asked of man in those days, so much you may be sure did the courageous individual
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repay himself in the freedom of private life, and in the audacity of private thought. It is, perhaps, this instind: of readiion that causes the word license to companion the word discipline in any historical account of an army. Nothing, they say, was more intimate and freer than the private bearing of those nobles of the ancien regime, who, nevertheless, stood at arms, so to speak, beneath the eye of the king on any public occasion. Delaunay, I remember, brought out this distindion of manners, when he played the part of Richelieu in Alexandre Dumas's '* Mademoiselle de Belle Isle."
To be a king of Spain, to preside at religious execu- tions, to have a wife whom no man, even to save her life, might touch on pain of death, was to be a creature sorely in need of private liberty, and the solace of confidential intercourse. Philip IV. seems to have been naturally kind, genial, and affable, and to have divided his leisure between the hunting- field and Velasquez' studio. The two, artist and king, grew old together, with like interests in horses, dogs, and painting ; thawing when alone into that easy familiarity between master and old servant, freezing instantly in public into the stiff positions that their parts in life required. Painter to the King when he was scarce twenty-five years old, Velasquez escaped most of the dangers and humiliations of professional portrait-painting, without losing its useful discipline of the eye, its rigorous test of the ever-present and exad:ing model.
Though remote from Italy, from its living jealousies, and its overwhelming past, Velasquez was able to
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copy Italian pidlures in the palaces of Spain, while he was permitted by the king's bounty to visit Rome and Venice as a person of some consequence. The situation favoured the growth of a genuinely personal way of looking at the world ; and, indeed, no one was more original in his art than Velasquez, and no one less afraid of dispensing with traditional receipts for truth and beauty. He sought more and more to express the essential quality of his own eyesight, and he grew less and less dependent on hints derived from other people's practice. What he painted therefore concerned him less than how he painted. Like Rembrandt, who never ceased to paint his own portrait, Velasquez studied one model, from youth to age, with unalterable patience and an ever-fresh inspiration. He could look at the king's well-known head with a renewed interest, as he went deeper into the mystery of eyesight, and became better informed as to the effedts of real light. His slow transformation of this face, through a hard realism of feature and detail, to the suavity of impressional beauty, seems comparable to that tireless climb of the Greek sculp- tors, through so many stiffly studied athletes, to the breadth of Phidias's gods, or the suppleness of the serene Hermes of Praxiteles. Unrelaxing criticism of beauty distinguishes the highest order of artist alone ; it comes from that thirst after perfection which kept the Greeks satisfied, artistic, even enthusiastic, whilst polishing for three hundred years the details and proportions of what we should call the same stale old style of architedlure. Curious about particular subjects, but incapable of conceiving a general ideal
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of sight itself, meaner artists sicken at the apparently ordinary, or the apparently stale ; and must be cockered up with the pride of lofty titles, and the conceit of novelty of motif, which they mistake for originality of view. On the other hand, those who constantly compare their work, not so much with decorative traditions, as with the beauty they see in reality, keep their senses adlive, and scent, even in the apparently commonplace subjedt, opportunity for the improvement which makes lor perfedlion.
The details of Velasquez's Hfe, the dates, adventures, and disputed attributions of his piftures, can all be studied in the translation of Carl Justi's book. It is perhaps more amusing to take a turn round the Prado before you have read about Velasquez, before you have heard what pidture is doubtful, and when each canvas was painted. One is apt to see too readily in a canvas what one has previously learnt in a book. If one has guessed the dates of pidtures, and roughly grouped them into periods, upon no other evidence than the style of the work or the testimony of the subjedl:, one really understands the growth of the painter's powers, and needs the historical document merely to corred: trifling errors and to elucidate doubtful points. For this reason I passed two or three days in the galleries at Madrid without any book-knowledge of Velasquez, and without any catalogue. For those who have not much time the plan has its drawbacks. Knowing nothing of the painter's life, they may well overlook matters that have given rise to serious question. It will be well, there- fore, to mention one or two significant dates and events in the painter's life, upon the authority of Carl Justi.
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Velasquez was born in 1599, ^^'^ ^^^^ ^^ 1660, and his career may be conveniently divided by his two visits to Italy in 1629 and 1649. His connexion with Philip IV. began when the king was eighteen and the painter twenty-four. Velasquez painted his first por- trait of Philip in 1623, and became the colleague of the king's Italian painters, Eugenio Caxesi, Gonzalez, and Carducho. In 1628, Rubens, — thfn fifty-one years old, and the most renowned artist of the day, — visited Madrid on a semi-political mission, and of course Velasquez a6led as his friend and guide to Spain. It was diredlly after his nine months' friendship with Rubens, and perhaps owing to the influence of the Flemish painter with the king, that Velasquez was permitted to undertake the Italian voyage in the train of Spinola, the conqueror of Breda. During a stay of eighteen months, he set himself to copy pid:ures, to paint landscape and figures on his own account, and to make acquaintance with Italian painters, not excepting his countryman Ribera. Upon his return to Spain he not only worked as usual at portraiture, but he also took a leading part in the decoration of the new palace Buen Retiro. During this middle period of his life, when he became the first painter of Spain, he counted among his immediate disciples his own son-in-law, J. B. del Mazo, and the more famous Murillo. The second journey to Rome, undertaken in 1649, separates this long period from that third and last division of his life, in which his finest and most charadleristic work was painted.
In his latest pidlures 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
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one whose ideal of art was to use his own eyes. His early pid:ures cannot be surely attached to any school ; they are of doubtful parentage, though, with some truth, one might affiliate them to Caravaggio and the Italian naturalists. From the first, he shows sensitiveness to form, and a taste for solid and dire6l painting. He quickly learnt to model with surprising justness, but for a long time he continued to treat a head in a group as he would if he saw it alone. Only slowly he learnt to take the impression of a whole scene as the true motif of a picture. In his early work he faithfully observed the relations between bits of his subjed:, but not always the relation of each bit to the whole. If we compare the realistic work of the young Velasquez with the pi6tures of the great Venetians, we shall find it lacking their comfortable unity of aspedl. That asped: may have been more remote in its relation to nature, but it was certainly ampler and more decoratively beautiful. Up to the age of thirty, indeed, Velasquez seemed content to mature quietly his powers of execution, without seeking to alter his style, or to improve the quality of his realism. Had he died during his first visit to Rome, it might have been supposed, without absurdity, that he had said his last word, and that, young as he was, he had lived to see his art fully ripened. It would be difficult, indeed, to do anything finer, with piecemeal realism for an ideal, than the later works of this first period. Pictures of the pre-Italian epoch are " The Water Carrier," " The Adoration of the Magi " (Prado, 1054), "The Shepherds" (National Gallery), "Bust of Philip in Armour" (Prado, 1071), fuU-length,
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"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 second period. One tastes a flavour of Venetian art in the subjedt pidures, and one remarks something bold, summary, and less intimate than usual, about the portraiture of this time. As examples we may take " The Surrender of Breda " (Prado, 1 060), " 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 equestrian " Philip IV." (Prado, 1066), the equestrian "Don Balthasar" (Prado, io68), the equestrian "Olivares" (Prado, 1069), " The Sculptor Montanez " (Prado, 1091), "The Admiral Pulido " (National Gallery), various landscapes, and a few studies such as "The Riding School" and its variations. During these twenty years, if ever, Velasquez relaxed his effort at naturalism, — not that he slackened his grip upon form, but that he seems to have accepted in Italy the necessity for professional pidiure-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
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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 fa6l, he adds the charm that we call impressionism to such work of the third period as "Innocent the Tenth," done in Rome, "Queen Mariana" (Prado, 1078), "Las Meninas " (Prado, 1062), "Las Hilanderas " ■ (Prado, 1 061), "Pablillos de Valladolid " (Prado, 1092), "iEsop" (Prado, 1 100), "Moenippus" (Prado, iioi), the so-called "Maria Teresa" (Prado, 1084), "Philip IV." (Prado, 1080), "Philip IV." (old. National Gallery), and some of the Dwarfs and Imbe- ciles in the Prado.
Some sojourn in the deadly capital of Spain is necessary if one would sound the variety of Velasquez, and learn how often he forestalled the discoveries of recent schools of painting. Various stages of his growth, as shown in the Prado, remind us of various stages in the progress of modern naturalism. Sudden gusts of his fancy for some type or some quality in nature ally this or that canvas by Velasquez with the work of a man or a movement in our century. The names of Regnault, Manet, Carolus-Duran, Henner, Whistler, and Sargent, rise to one's lips at every turn in the Prado ; one thinks, but less inevitably, of Corot, when one sees the landscape of Velasquez. His early work recalls John Philip and Wilkie, while the girl in "Las Hilanderas" should be the very ideal of art to the Pinwell, Walker and Macbeth school. Except the "Venus" belonging to Mr. R. Morritt of Rokeby Hall,
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the Prado lacks no pidlure essential to the full under- standing of the painter's art. No other colledion can give a just idea of the great works in Madrid. To see only the National Gallery, the Louvre, and the various private collections in England, leaves one without an adequate idea of the equestrian portraits, "Philip IV. " (1066), "Olivares" (1069), and '* Don Balthasar " (1068); "The Surrender of Breda" (1060), "The Sculptor Martinez Montanez" (logi), " Moenippus " (i loi), "^sop" (i 100), "The Maria Teresa " (1084), "Las Meninas " (1062), "Las Hilanderas " (1061), and the series of Dwarfs and Imbeciles.
These pictures have changed very little; but as with all old pigment, a good light is necessary to show the subtlety of the values and the expressive character of the subdued or suggested detail. Fortunately the light is excellent in the two chief galleries of the Prado, which contain the principal pictures. The first, a long room, wider than the long gallery of the Louvre, is covered with a barrel-ceiling. About half-way down on the left, a door opens into the other room, a large, well-lit odlagon. Several large side-lit rooms with dark corners, try the eyes, and bafBe efforts at compari- son ; fortunately, however, they contain for the most part inferior pidiures, the works of predecessors of Velasquez, and a few early canvases by the Master himself.
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CHAPTER II.
TRUSTING to report and to the evidence of reproduftions, I expedted to find " The Sur- render of Breda " (1060) the finest Velasquez in the Prado. So I might have thought, if the painter's natural gift had been less explicitly set forth, if he had never lived to paint " 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 Unes of older decorative con- ventions, than to start a new one on the expression of a personal view of beauty. From his early standpoint of the realistic painter, Velasquez 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 vlife that he divined a new art in the practice of personal impressionism. "The Surrender of Breda" challenges the greatest masters on their own ground ; it is un- worthy 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 intended to co-operate with other historical works in the decoration of the
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Salon de los Rei?tos of the Buen Retiro. Decoration scarcely 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 pidlure might be hung in the Ducal Palace at Venice. But to realize such an ambition was by-play, and not the work of Velasquez's liie.
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 Odiagon 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 pidture, 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 expedled, it agrees in many points with other canvases painted during that period in which Velasquez was so much occupied with
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palatial decoration. By its size, by its freedom of touch, by the variety and warmth of its colours, by the com- plexity of its pattern, by its dark, foreground browns, by the quality of its blue distances, it is allied to the large equestrian portraits, 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 Montanes " 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 subjeA 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 subje(5l was unfitted to bring out the more original and charader- istic qualities of Velasquez's genius. Subjects, how- ever grand in title and dignified in historical associa- tion, 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 subjed: in itself can make or mar art ; subjed is indifferent except for its favourable or unfavourable effed on the artist. Even the record of a seen thing produces a noble or an ignoble effed according as it records a grand or a trivial manner of using the eyesight, according as it shows a mean anxiety about details, petty circum- stance and wiry pattern, or reveals sympathy with
19
Salon de los Reittos of the Buen Retire. Decoration scarcely 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 realize such an ambition was by-play, and not the work of Velasquez's liie.
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 Oftagon 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 expelled, it agrees in many points with other canvases painted during that period in which Velasquez was so much occupied with
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• • I I • « I I I t I I
palatial decoration. By its size, by its freedom of touch, by the variety and warmth of its colours, by the com- plexity of its pattern, by its dark foreground browns, by the quality of its blue distances, it is allied to the large equestrian portraits, 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 Montanes " of the Prado (1091). The Admiral indeed is so unlike any portrait by Velasquez that some have doubted its authenticity, but it is very hke the figures in "The Surrender of Breda." It is difficult to conceive that this great subjed: 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 subjedt was unfitted to bring out the more original and charader- istic qualities of Velasquez's genius. Subje6ls, how- ever grand in title and dignified in historical associa- tion, 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 subjed: in itself can make or mar art ; subjed: is indifferent except for its favourable or unfavourable effeft on the artist. Even the record of a seen thing produces a noble or an ignoble effed: according as it records a grand or a trivial manner of using the eyesight, according as it shows a mean anxiety about details, petty circum- stance and wiry pattern, or reveals sympathy with
19
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 subjed: in literature. This figure of the God and that of the street porter differ in title rather than in subjedt, for after all, the same model or true pidiorial subjedl 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 compa6f this broad but arbi- trary illustration, explanatory of crowds and costumes in a given situation, to adjust all this coloured acces- sory, 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 distradling nor too utterly unlike the truth.
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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 background.
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. Caxcsi follows his colleague Velasquez in his idea of colour, and in his view of the contending claims of open-air effedt, decorative unity and historical fulness. But his reliefs are hard and even, his blocks of colour unfused, his drawing clumsy, and his whole picture duller, more spotty, and less arranged than " The Surrender of Breda." In colouring, in suavity of effc6l, that great Velasquez compares with any Titian. Its principal figures stand with as noble a bearing as any in paint* ing. 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 Luxembourg Palace. But the figures in the " Recep- tion of Marie de Medicis " abound in courtliness and pomp, while the conqueror and the conquered of Breda, with a more human though a decently cere- monious stateliness, ad: out two of the most trying circumstances of life. The figures form the knot of an admirable composition, but this central interest is rather prepared by studied artifice than made im- portant by the efFedt 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 senti- ments of the pi6lure preserved. The dignity of the
21
two figures would be scarcely impaired by the omis- sion 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 impres- sion. One may look long before it crosses one's mind to think of any colour scheme, of tints arbitrarily contrasted or harmonized, of masses balanced, of lines opposed or cunningly interwoven, of any of the tricks ot the jnetier^ 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 realizes the result of his separate observations no more than a geographer engaged on tlie survey of an unknown coast. He will not conceive of his pidure as a big pattern which produces detail ; he compiles a great many 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 pidure is a revelation of
22
I I I I I I
$
Wa1t«fr &Bout«l).PhSc.
the way the race has felt a scene of the kind during thousands of years. The unconscious habit of the 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 generalization. The mind that conceived it failed to grasp it except by successive adls of imagination. Its parts obey a purely formal instead of an impressional unity. The com- position 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 poign- ancy 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 pidlure 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 toes.
As an art grows, everything that enters into it be- comes 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
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more logical principle of unity, than a mere succession of separate phrases and climaxes ; and as painting developed, painters began to comprehend other and more vital means of pi6lure-making than the use of compelling lines and a formal composition. They had learnt that strong points in a pidlure kill each other, and that force in art is an affair of relation. They were to learn that there is a realistic as well as a deco- rative 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 canvas 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 ot 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 perspediive, modelling, colour, and defini- tion ; but for the present it is sufficient to settle it upon the merely decorative ground of complexity of pattern. If a certain proportion of cutting up recommends itself as beautiful and effedlive in any one sketch or study, then unquestionably a compilation of such studies
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I I (
0
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 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 pidiure. Whether you compile ad:ua] separate sketches on one canvas, or merely paint parts of that canvas under different impressions, the fault is the same.
If there is anything in this unity ot impression, " The Topers " is not the best pidure in the world. We 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 each head is a marvel of handling, of modelling, of charader, but has this handUng 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 of a pidture. A Dutch portrait group at any rate claims quite an equal rank in the hierarchy of art. Rem- brandt'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 powerfiiUy executed than " The Topers."
Only a large mind takes a large view of a subjed, and not without effort too, whether the matter in question concerns art, philosophy, or pradlical life. For instance, the ordinary amateur of music likes short
25 E
phrasing and a jerky emphasis, which makes the most of every accent, while the ordinary connoisseur com- prehends and relishes the cheaper realism of the Dutch masters, but cannot easily grasp the broader truths of Velasquez. Small fafts, shown by hard detail and strong, frequent contrast, are more easily perceived than the adion of a principle which governs a whole scene. To many the finesse of Velasquez seems weakness, 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 connois- seurs may not question the beauty of reality or the dignity ot technique, but the first they assimilate only in little pieces, while they perceive only the immediate issues of the second. Quite another objedlor 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 somebody by an early and religious Italian ? No, truly ; but the mind of the literary objedor, 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
26
expression, 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 unity of aspedt, and a splendid perfed:ion of technical re- sources. Nothing that art has ever won is wanting here unless it be composition by line, the charm of the nude figure, and the rhythmic swirl of Raphael's drawing. No great man is separable from his tech- nique, and the diiTerence 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 pidlures, " 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 Ufe. In exa- mining the technique of Velasquez we shall refer to these works, and shall describe others as occasion may arise.
CHAPTER III.
IT is not the lover of pictures, but the devotee of his own spiritual emotions who needs to be told that technique 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 fadl, 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, intellediual 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 abstrad: and specula- tive 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
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senses are in tune with the pulse of nature may make a better artist than the man of loftiest thought who is encased in nerves insensitive to the quality of musical intervals or the character of shapes and colours. The man of abstrad: mind apprehends great ideas presented in the abstrad: medium ot 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 colouring, at the contradidiion 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 — intel- le6l — 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 must 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 imagination in each art is a gift whose absence cannot be compensated for either by one of the other imaginations or by the abstract intelled itself. Imagination in words is not Imagination in colour or form, as the cases of Turner and Goethe
3°
amply prove. Without matter there is no art ; with- out matter there is no stuff in which imagination may create an image. Sentiment is not imagination ; spirituahty is not artistic feeUng. We all cry, laugh, and put on airs ; we do not all imagine occasions and fashions of crying, laughing, and striking attitudes. We feel the excitement of a street fight, yet we can- not 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 uncertain flicker of shadows and windy lamplight. ~It is a sensitiveness to the special qualities ot 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 charader which enables him to imagine a pidlure all of a piece, all tending to express the same sentiment, all instind: and alive with feeUng. Moreover, any difference that may exist between the material bases of the arts, exafts a corresponding difference between the qualities of temperament and imagination in the artists who pradlise 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 pidures, whether realistic or decorative in aim, whether
31
worked in oil or water, tint or line, monochrome or colour.
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 dependence on life. Words, since they serve as fixed counters or symbols, cannot be wholly wrenched from a determined meaning and suggestion ; architefture satisfies a need of common life as well as an aesthetic craving, and painting not only weaves a purely decorative pattern, but also pretends to imitate the appearance of the world. None of these arts tran- quilly 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 principles. First ^ Art is not Life ; for life is fi.rst-hand passionate emotion, while art deals with emotion second hand, retrospedlive and disinterested. Life is variable, and a mixture of all materials — space, time, sound, colour, form, etc. ; art is limited, partially controllable by the artist, and comparatively permanent. Second, Senti- ment is not Imagination ; for sentiment precedes art, and is common to all men, while imagination is a
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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 separate mediums in which to conceiv'e 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 diredl and immediate qualities — as notes and intervals in music, which derive their charadier 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 charadler 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 impressions 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 objedl seems big but by relation to a smaller, no mass simple except when viewed as a whole in contrast to another, and no tone so bright that a brighter cannot make it
33 F
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 you see tliem fixed in unalterable relations, and always bound to express one and the same point of view. The laws by which one pidures an effe6l on the flat consequendy differ from those that regulate ordinary sight. Many collocations of form or colour diat please in a sunlit space of three dimensions with fluduating 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 effedl.
Plainly, then, there are two interests to be recon- ciled in a picture, the fadls and impressions of nature on one hand, and, on the other, the beauties and exigencies of the fi^amed pidorial world. A modus vive?idi must be estabUshed between the imitative and the decorative, and the compadt between these two may be called the convention of the art of painting. To objedl 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
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line a positive charadler by placing it in some relation to the four sides of the canvas. To show a line quite unconditioned or uncomposed, one would require a canvas without limits, that is to say, nature. Con- vention, then, there must be, but it need not be rigid; it may vary with the impressions of artists, with the fads 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 knowledge of an objedt 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 painting, 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 aspedt.
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
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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 enforced is suggested by the mood in which you happen to look at your motif. If this be granted, then technique is as important to an art as the body to man. Both of them appear and adl for two hidden questionable 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 pidure, 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 apprehended 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, dissedt them dead. This necessity we will face, and will look separately at the qualities of Velasquez's tech- nique, such as composition, colour, modelling, and brush work.
CHAPTER IV.
WHEN he composed a pi6lure Velasquez no longer relied altogether upon the arrange- ment 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 objedls can be detedied 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 concerning
37
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 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 diredlion, 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 com- pletes the impressional unity of the composition and heightens the solemnity of the sentiment. I have often looked at " The Marriage at Cana in Gahlee " 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 gal- leries of marble, opening to the blue sky, although they are incidents in the composition of the "Marriage at Cana," scarcely seem to afi'ed: the mood in which the artist regards his figure group. They add no meaning to the general asped: of the group, they cause no exaltation or depression of sentiment, they afie6l 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 teUing us that the scene
38
took place in certain surroundings, but not affeding the internal treatment or sentiment of the figure group. yOn the other hand, the vast gloomy top of " Las Meninas," the empty foreground of a Whistlerian etching, or the darkness of a mysterious Rembrandt forms an essential part of a pidure and controls the force of colours and definitions, explains the lighting and emphasizes the charader of the sentiment which invests the figures. In fadt, the surroundings 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 difi^erently owing to the presence of 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 pidlure. It was so when Whistler left more than half his canvas, this time the lower half, bare and unpeopled by incident. Most people failed to perceive that it is sometimes impossible otherwise to show the difference between an objed: far off subtending a small angle of sight and the same objedt near at hand subtending a large angle. For the sake of dignity Corot at times consented to let this distindion remain doubtful, but his compliance has caused many to
39
question the truth of his pidlures. It will be found that Velasquez, while he revealed new truths about nature, scarcely ever forgot that a pidure 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 pidure 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 frequently exalt a canvas to a position which its real execution cannot maintain. Such pidlures are often the work of illustrators, that is of men who conceive 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 fad: by the tache^ to use a word of the early Impressionists, and the vision of it was not translated into those lines which, if you remember, Delacroix neither saw in nature nor wished to consider the sole source of beauty in art.
An old master made all his space alive with a swirl of flowing lines or built it compa6l like a monument with blocks of balanced colour. Immense chunks of red, blue, orange white, brown, etc., are fitted into each other as if they were the separate pieces of a puzzle.
40
On this system each area of colour may require a different and separate process of working to secure the quahty of its tint or to engage it in a semblance of chiaroscuro and effedt. 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 careful cartoons, their very few notes of general effedt, 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 corredlion 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 their pidlure beforehand, and approached it from a previous composition carefully calculated to occupy and decorate
41 G
the given space. It seems possible that Velasquez began a pidlure in quite another spirit; that he conceived of it rather as an ensemble of tone than as a 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 some- times 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 pidure. 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
42
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II I I I
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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 it the recolledtion of some a6lual occasion of sight. It is so with his por- traits and with his subjed-pidlures. The two Philo- sophers, -^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 re- markably 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 an equal depth of distance and air. The asped: 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 pidlure 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 aspedt 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
43
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" 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 aspedl of a view and studies the appearances 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 charader by successive study of pieces of the pidlure instead of by a comprehensive view of the whole subjedl. The faults induced by such technique are hardness, confusion, spottiness, and the sacrifice of the mystery of enveloping air and light to petty markings and exaggerated 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 defeats. Yet their pictures cannot pretend to express fully the more subtle mysteries of real light or to render an impression of the whole asped: of an adual scene upon a painter's eye.
When we are absorbed in the work of any great man whose art happens to express our own feelings, a natural and not unseemly enthusiasm leads us to 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, sentiments,
44
and perceptions. You may as well compare Milton and Praxiteles as Beethoven and Palestrina. Tonality is not more potent and far-reaching in its effedl upon modern music than real lighting upon the arrangement of a picture. Both can steep the commonplace in mystery, can flash a new meaning into old forms, can supersede worn-out conventions, can eledrify a dead passage, can sustain and bind together a whole composition. Tone in a pidiure and tone in music may not be better than the older methods of composition, but they awake quite different feelings in the mind, and so it is difiicult 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 fair 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 fads of common realism. The art of the thing escapes you
45
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.
Compared with those of Rubens, for instance, the pidures 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 strettOy till the violent movement seems to undulate the entire pattern of the picture. Certainly examina- tion proves the feeling due rather to decorative repe- titions 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 stifBy 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 attradions of a decorative consistency in the flow of lines. The breathing of these young figures in their stifl* clothes, the quality of their flesh, the gait and bearing 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 pid:orial art. The arrangement of this group, which extends into depth and darkness,
46
shows exadily how it was felt in relation to its sur- roundings. 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 was and still is that every space must co-operate in the efFeft, 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 piftures at the Prado is to see them at great disad- vantage. 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 assem- blage of poses, draperies, wagging beards, contorted limbs, and sweeping decorative lines. Few are the pictures that show a unity embracing colour, defini- tion, modeUing, and tone as well as line — the unity of purpose that we find in " The Last Supper " of Lionardo, 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
47
is affe6ling and mysterious, or its colour bound together by any principle beyond juxtaposition, repe- tition, and the compulsion of harmonious line. Its upper part, moreover, has no conne6lion with its lower except through symbolism. " The Assump- tion," by Titian, although glorious in the power of its colour and the magnitude of its execution, scarcely answers to the finest ideal of pidure-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 pidlure, 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 pi6lure, of which it is the very heart and vitals, yet without doubt her state- ment had some meaning. Probably the sense of worldliness came from the hard definition of the top part, and the dislike of the gorgequs 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 fad:, he utilizes the expression of space as well as the expression of form to give charader to his picture. This is seen in the modelled depths of space that encase and per-
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meate " Las Meninas," " The Spinners," Mr. Morritt's " Venus," the " ^Esop," 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 contradistindion, reaHstic. " The Adoration of the Kings " is opaque and dark, without a sense of space, either in the quality of the colour or in the arrange- ment of the pidlure. 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 pidures of Velasquez's middle life, as I have said, are decorative in aim, and the equestrian portraits of Philip IV., Olivares, and Don Balthazar resemble " The Surrender of Breda." The composition of these is very much freer and broader than that of the early pidures. Indeed, the canvases of this time are the only pidures which show anything of that scarcely definable air of pose and make-up which one expedls 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 beautiful ease of patterns worked by Velasquez him-
49 H
self, 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 pidlures 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, indeed, upon any other of the many traditional resources of composition. But it would be narrow-minded to blame either the composers by Hne or the composers by spot. Different ends justify different means in each case, and, moreover, composers, like cooks, although they have principles, apply them ultimately in pradice at the didation 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 pidure without feeling sick at its artificiaHty. 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 depided figures looked at from above they have been told that
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their pidlures were unnatural by those accustomed to see people painted on a studio throne. But when it was first introduced did even perspe6live look natural, or did it require custom to familiarize 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 repre- sentation of human passions appears madness. In such a matter of taste as the point at which a canvas be- comes over spotty can one pronounce with certainty ? There is a boiling point on the thermometer ; 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. First^ the point of spottiness greatly depends on whether the eye habitually 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 comprehensible and orderly by rhythm in the design, but then the spec- tator 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 inti- macy by gradations of tone rather than by fixed con-
51
tours. Thus, while a painted Holbein differs very little in method and aim from a Holbein drawing on white paper, a piAure 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 Hne weavers constantly run two or three pictures into one frame, so that if you negledl 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 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 composition 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 diredtion of the cherub's wings, which point out of the picture and downwards, instead of in and upwards. 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, the photogravure of " Las Meninas " is taken
52
from a large study, four feet wide, belonging to Mr. Banks, of Kingston Lacy. As may be noted, it only differs from the larger pidture in that the king and queen are not refleded 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 pi6lure 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 furdier on the left Velasquez, who had stepped back to look at his pidnre ; further still on the right a duenna and courtier talking; while at the distant end of the gallery the king saw his queen and himself refledled in a mirror, and, through the open door, Don Joseph Nieto drawing back a curtain. The canvas shown in the pidlure would naturally be the one on which Velas- quez was painting the king's portrait. Some, how- ever, will have it to be the very canvas of " Las Meninas," which Velasquez was painting from a reflec- tion in a mirror placed near to where the king had been sitting. The perspective in the pidiure 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 pidture 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 pidture sud- denly occurred to him or to the king. The canvas
53
of " Las Meninas " is made of separate pieces sewn together, and one of these just contains the infanta, with room for accessories or a 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 own 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 manufadiory of tapestry, was painted later than " Las Meninas," which it resembles in one or two points. In both pictures the top runs up into gloom, though the vaulted chamber of " The Spin- ners" does not tower up and dominate the composition so much as the upper part of " Las Meninas." Both pid:ures are conceived in tone and steeped in the mystery of light, and " The Spinners," in a higher degree, are cheered, in the midst of their 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 sinuously and harmoniously than the rigid forms of " Las Meninas," and the masses twine and inter- weave in a more rhythmic and balanced pattern. " Las Meninas " is graver, nobler, and more imposing, also less expedled, less formal, and less aided by artificial elegances of arrangement. "Las Hilanderas" is more supple and insinuating in its grace of pattern, more en- chanting and varied in its treatment of colour and detail.
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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 " iEsop," " Moenippus," " Maria Teresa," and others in the Prado, can rival the importance of " Las Meninas " and " The Spinners." It will be well, 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, iiio) is enough to make us proclaim Velasquez a modern and an impressionist, when we think of the contem- porary 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 pidlure. On the left you see the Tagus bounded by a hedge of distant trees, sur- mounted 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 tall towers of gloom, • rise into a blue sky streaked with floating filaments of cloud, while on the dusty road below, coaches and
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cavaliers, like a string of inse(3:s, cross the brown empty foreground and plunge into the deep recesses of the avenue. The canvas is a large one for land- scape, and it is treated throughout w^ith a breadth of style proportionate to the size of the composition, and suitable to the implied distance of the spedlator from the frame. The manner of seeing recalls the work of both Corot and Whistler though neither of these painters ever saw it. In this pidlure, as in his other open-air works, Velasquez has cut the scene out of nature in a personal manner, so as to fit his sentiment about the place. He has insured the harmony of smaller details, both in tone and line, by swamping accidental or contradidory forms such as the saw-like edges of trees, or accidental and distracting holes of light in the darker depths of shades. This pidlure and the "Fountain of the Tritons" (Prado, 1109), 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-subjedts, Velasquez does not seek ideal beauties or acceptably grand, poetic, religious and pidluresque 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 ecclesias- tical sentiment. The thing that he paints has a flavour
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1
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 relation among proportions which gives grandeur, delicacy, or an air of captivating quaintness. Of many qualities possible to painting and useful in composition, proportion is at once the most enduring in its effedl, and the most unobtrusive in its compul- sion on the eye. Some qualities exad: a strained and conscious effort of appreciation ; their full expression in a pidlure 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 consciously. Certain efforts of draughtsmanship, for instance, require study and appeal to an intelligent wide-awake interest in adlion, anatomy and things beyond the immediate presence of the canvas. The subordination by harmony of complicated elements can only be fairly enjoyed by an intclledtual combined with an intuitive operation. Mere contrast of colour sets the nerves on the quivive ; 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 us 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 recognizing 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 mountains. Fine proportion always seems to have grown up naturally, it shows none of the difficulties that have
S7 I
been painfully overcome, none of the snares of annoy- ance that have been skilfully avoided. Proportion cannot be done by rule ; it is experimental and intui- tive, and its effeft, however potent, is unintelledlual. To make it by law is to copy mechanically. The proportions of the Parthenon are for the Parthenon and must be changed for another building. Of course, space-fillers use proportion but oftener a more or less imitable harmony of lines ; Velasquez oftener propor- tion. Hence 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.
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CHAPTER V.
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 pidture, it is equally impossible to lay down hard and fast rules of pradtice, 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, instindlive preferences, causes one man to feel elation at the rich extrava- gance 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 apolo- gize for speaking of my own feelings ; art is meaning- less without personality, and its adlion can only be studied in its effedl upon oneself.
As a child I was fond of engravings after certain pidures, 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 solemnity of the black and white had disappeared, like
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the grandeur of a figure when it is tricked out in tinsel and motley. Yet I can remember that I was pleased 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 con- trast the charm of the prevailing sheet of soft silvery iridescence, or impalpable umbery warmth that veils and reveals objedls 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 effed: 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 abandons 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 Fontaine- bleau, 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 ;
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he set me to paint in the forest, and I learnt that colour was not necessarily a blazing falsity. Then schools of art overwhelmed me, and face to face with the difficulties of 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 many who feel with me that many bright colours of extreme chromatic difference con- found the perception of tone, and give the pidture an air of insincerity, shallow pomp, and decorative flashi- ness. 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 modifi- cation 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 vidlory 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
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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 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 effedl 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 land- scape, 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
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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 the primitive realist tints small separate objedls 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 effed: of colour against colour, while the impressionist notes or imagines the general tone of the whole field which he paints and then 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 impressionist, one sees evidence of that liking for unity of some kind which pervades every art. In painting it may appear in line, chiaro- scuro, colour, or in a combination of all the qualities. An inborn sense of decorative colour seems to recom- mend a unity of richness, in fad: a kind of varnished glow, to the natural man. You see it in the love for refledions, 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 pidure and solves them in a warm and luscious juice. The world in general admires the harmonizing effed of time upon the tints of a pidure, and the artist of a decora- tive turn of mind has been greatly influenced by the
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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 effed: 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. In this case, of course, one means by nature the man's impression of the colour-efFe6t 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 gray. Velasquez aimed at the cool eifedt of silvery light, and if you look at the ensemble of his pi6lure as he looked at nature, you will rarely see a poor passage of colour.
No pictures maintain such a close unity of key as these 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 pidlure of one tone in contrast to the hat. Yet the key is so subtly \aried, so delicately nuanced that the pidlure, unless through such a contrast, appears to be a luminous tissue of air, not definitely red, green, black, or yellow. But " Las Meninas," even when subjedled to this test of contrast with real people
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sitting on the bench before it, preserves its appearance of truth and natural vigour. Its colour relations con- tinue to look as subtle and as naturally complex as before ; and when you look at both nature and the pidture, your eye only seems to pass from one room into another. The sense of space and roundness in the real room is not greater than in the painted room. On the other hand, contrast with the real world exposes no exaggerated reliefs, no over-trenchant definitions, no false lighting in " Las Meninas." It is, in fad:, 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 disillusioning 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 pidlures that have not gained by time.
The general principle which unites the colours of his later pidlures 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 affeded by juxtaposition, by atmospheric conditions, and, above all, by their inclination to the source of
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light. This view of the asped 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 asped: 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 pidlure. True, he seldom chooses a subjedt from nature which contains many bright tints, but he always treats those he admits with a perfedl 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 motjfwho^Q chief local tints are black or white. By his treatment of blacks in such pi6lures as "Moenippus,"" Philip IV. Old" (Prado, 1080), and the " Sculptor Montafies " (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 gray 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
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notes the different quality of the black in "Portrait of a Man" (Prado, 243) by Greco (i 548-1625) who painted portraits in Spain before the days of Velasquez. Greco opens a pit or hole of black asphalte; Velasquez 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 they are plentifully diluted with white. These men are the drunkards of colour. We will not deny that they like it ; both the gour?net 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 paralleled 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," "PhiHp IV." (Prado, 1080), and "Maria Teresa" (Prado, 1084). This brown of the "Vulcan" is an almost monochromatic tissue of tone which accom- panies and unites the colour of the pidlure. It is almost as positive as the brown bituminous vehicle used some twenty years ago by persons supposed to
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have been educated at Munich. Few strong local tints are embedded in the brown tone of the "Vulcan"; you have nothing in the subjedl 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 pidure consists of originally grayish 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 1 6 3 o. The National Gallery picture is grayer 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 charadteristic canvases by Velasquez, the one in which real atmosphere plays upon the widest range of colour is perhaps " Las Hilanderas," other- wise "The Spinners" (Prado, 1061).
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CHAPTER VI.
WHILE speaking of colour one has gone some way towards describing the office ot model- ling ; but there remains a little to say about this important subjedl. 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 incHnations 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 perspedtive and the single focus of impressionism. In fadt, the impressionists are the descendants of the perspedlivists ; they fight the same battle, and are pledged to the same cause, to show, not how things are, but how they seem. Not- withstanding the contrary opinion of certain painters, I cannot but consider modcUing the most valuable possessoin of an impressionist, as by it he may render his impression of shape without riveting the eye or detaining the attention by defined lines or
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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, 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 pi6lure 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 effed:, with the neatest perfedlion of finish. Other men, it will be said, have shown a fine command 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," the arm of Bacchus in " The Topers," and the heads in that picture, are superb bits of modelling. In what consists the difference between this early rendering of form and the modelling of the later pictures ? To some extent perhaps in a growing feeling for comparative strengths of definition, which enabled him to avoid tricky or arbitrary expression, and to pass from piece-meal modelling to impressionistic modelling. A definition may not disappear 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
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Velasquez's progress in comparative definition may be seen by comparing portraits of the second period, like the "Sculptor Montanes " (Prado, 1091) or the "Admiral Pulido," of the National Gallery, with close tight early work, such as " Philip IV." (Prado, 1070), or even Philip, 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 " PhiHp 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 effed: of light and to have expressed it with the sorcery of truth and not by any kind ot 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 idealized forms instead of the adtual 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 adluaHty in the forms themselves. Idealized form can be ren- dered with the least possible convention, and with a fully coloured and real treatment of light, whereas adtual 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
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a deep shade. If used as modelling, this arbitrary principle would assume a spedator 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 must suffice. Lionardo da Vinci, when he was writing of modelling, blames the conventionality of previous praftitioners 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 of Sir E. Burne -Jones, their model- ling seems arbitrary and their beauties conventional 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 effedt. 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
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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 dis- tance. A red, blue, or yellow world would also model chromatically 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 inclina- tion 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 dis- tinguish, but eloquently proclaim important changes of surface. The constant repetition of sharp accidents tires the eye ; it is like the false cry of wolf that forestalls the effedt of the really momentous occasion. This appears especially evident in landscape, where it is counted unwise to pretend to fully outline and model objeds too small to properly exhibit the effedt of shadow and light. The artist who insists on giving such accidents an important treatment generally em- ploys a false kind of definition which really belongs
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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 incon- gruously 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 model- Hng, painters are apt to take refuge in the older conventions of line, which contradict and destroy the consistency 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 inclination 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 impres- sionist to feel the connexion between such values with anything like the sensation of certitude with which
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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 markings of a scene only in some relation to its whole asped. The ensemble of a scene hypnotizes and fascinates an impressionist as if it were a real, per- sonal, and indivisible entity and not a mere sum of small quantities.
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 pidiures to vary his manner of painting according to the sentiment of his impression, so that you will find in his work no pattern of brush- work, no settled degree of intimacy in the modelling, no constantly equal force of realization 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 sufiiciently broad in treatment to look comfortable, would produce, if composed in one fi-ame, a pattern too crowded and spotty from a decorative point of view. But such a compilation of unmodified studies would sin also from an impressionistic point of view. It would imply three focuses of impression and therefore whatever character 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 asped: of the pidure and its technique.
To people who have never painted, such terms as impressions, fields of vision, and angles of sight, may seem fancifial, or at least irrelevant to art. An illus-
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tratioii may help to show them that there is no absolute realism of appearance, but that different eyes and dif- ferent habits of looking at the world make manifest different qualities and different aspedls 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 letters, etc. On the other hand, a child reading letter by letter, widi 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 re- quired to give them the current impression and meaning of writing, they have to work over an unusually 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 al- together 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 effed: of a portrait upon a blank canvas — an effed: 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
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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 gray or fawn tone of great simplicity. Such are, for instance, " The Crucifixion " (Prado, 1055), and " PhiHp IV." (1080), in the same gallery. Indeed, the black blankness surrounding "The Crucifixion " alone saves its antique Bellini-like details 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 pidtures 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 fiill 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 subjedt 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 attention 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 "iEsop," costume portraits like "Maria Teresa" (Prado, 1084), or simple busts like the head of Philip (Prado, 1080).
But if the art of all these pidlures is based on the same
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principles, and perhaps for that very reason, the tech- nique is very different in them all. You may note a wonderful variety in Velasquez's style of modelHng a head, not only in different periods of his life, but in pidlures 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 surfaces slide into each other in a loose supple manner, that 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 inchnation, with an intimacy of feeling and 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 effe<Et oi 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 diredlion of the forms, so as to supplement tone and strudture by the sentiment of the execution. In many cases, however, he smudges so subtly as to convey no sense of diredl handling. The Hmb or objed 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 can- vas grew out of the scene before his eyes; that his severe and stately colour is founded on nature, and that
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his execution becomes quiet and exadl, 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 approximations 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 moment- ary excitement, but is apt, like 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 respedl ; one cannot easily fathom the depth of his insight or weary of his endless variety.
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CHAPTER VII.
A FEW pidures may be mentioned as examples of his differences of treatment at various times of his life and in the service of various kinds of impression. "Philip IV." (Frado, 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 con- founded with the soft iridescence of the luminous envelope. I scarcely noticed this canvas at first, but its unobtrusive thoroughness gained ground every day, and at last its silvery light fascinated me even more than the more striking illuminations of " The Spinners," " JEsop" or " Moenippus." It is smoother and more polished in surface than these pidures, making, indeed, quite a contrast to the particularly rough "^sop" near it ; so that it has acquired a greener, mellower, and more varnished look which adds to its appearance of extreme delicacy. One feels that this portrait of Philip goes beyond human powers in the intimacy of its modelHng. It seems to challenge nature in finish and one almost resents that art and nature should both
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triumph to this extent on the same canvas. Perhaps the more visionary modelling of the head in "Moenippus," the grand unashamed bravura oi '■^ M?,o^^''' the looser, broader execution of the faces in " Las Meninas," " The Spinners," and the " Maria Teresa," may be more im- pressively magisterial, because more artistic, or, if you will, more artificial. The modelling of these pidlures 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 im- pressions and the convention of a wider view. This Philip in the Prado, like that in the National Gallery, only with less accessory, 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 subjedl.
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 summarily 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 Montahes" reminds oneof aCarolus-Duran, with its bold planes as firm as if sculptured ; while in *' Maria Teresa " on the other hand, the face looks
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soft and smooth owing to concealed flat modelling, and the head seems comparatively of small 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, "iEsop" and "Moenippus," difi^er no less from each other in workmanship than from the foregoing. "^Esop," the most cleverly handled of all Velasquez's heads, is the one that most supports the legend of his swaggering dexterity in flourishing a paint- brush. It is a rough impasto woven into a most mar- vellously expressive texture, which is unfortunately 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 fa6t, 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 recognize "Las Meninas" as a work done on the same principle as some of those so-called eccentric pidlures of recent impressionists.
Everyone will recall compositions in which a near figure, chair, table, or stretch of foreground, appears an enlarged and dislocated spedtre, extravagantly mem- bered of meaningless and accidental blotches. But these splashes obey a logical principle, although they may too often defeat their purpose by their infelicitous
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quaintness. The mind glides past these ghosts of objeAs 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 pidure, 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 distributing the atten- tion. 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 sur- rounding definitions, by the arrangement of the figures, by the strong opposition of the open door and by the character of the modelling, always occupies the key of the situation. But this is not all, for the Dwarf closer to you on the right, as well as Velasquez further 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 looseness 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 modelling than the central figures, and with a less concentrated style and a more swimming touch. But there is no shocking distindlion 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 jundlures, that the various
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interests of the pidure are governed and subordinated. In the modern pidure 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, al- though 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 refledlion in a mirror.
In the busier, richer, and more accentuated canvas of " The Spinners," the shadowed left half adts as a foil to the right, and in its treatment we feel the master even more perhaps than in the lively right half which con- tains 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 organized. True, it contains about as strong local colour as Velas- quez 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 pidhire, the spindle, the stool, the floor and the objedis 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 circumambiance 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 exquisitely-turned head, and the magnificence of her sweeping gesture due, in part at least, to the natural
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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 sur- roundings, 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 o6tagon room close to "The Spinners" hangs the costume-pifture "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 accessory of this extraordinary cos- tume; lace, ruffles, embroidery, every inch of the dress is painted by Velasquez, with a running slippery touch v/hich 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
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heavy, and silvered like the passages in light, so that black would tell upon it as a rude brutaHty of tone. Near *' Maria Teresa," you may see work of many kinds ; the beginnings of paint in a Van Eyck, contemporary art in the Murillo, and not far off A. Moro's " Mary Tudor," painted for Philip 11. 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 "MariaTeresa." Rembrandt's "Artemisia " may not rank among his good paintings, and certainly its gloom is heavy and its transitions fi-om shadow to light are harsh in comparison 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 pidures seem to lack the subtlety of real light.
It is instrudive 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 no- where suggests a rival impression to the main one. In fa6l, 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 Velas-
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quez, 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 vitalized by just degrees of force instead of being killed by an equal realization all over the can- vas. 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 hat and feather, and the dog itself, are all given with a gusto that never seems to interfere with true drawing and broad modelling. The handling of "^sop" is graver and more stately, but everything here is also in its right place and of the right force, down to the sub- dued 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 or the face in "^sop." Again, when one looks at the " Sculptor Montaiies," one thinks of Carolus-Duran ; of the Whisder of " Lady 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 fadl, when we look back upon the variety of all
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these pidures, it is evident that Velasquez never used style for its own sake. Whether you look at a point of his composition, colouring, modelling, or handhng, it appears always to have been decided by the asped of each pidure and not by preconceived principles. His composition is never a pattern forced upon nature, his drawing is not an effort to realize abstrad 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 this almost perfedl attempt at the illusion of light. This smoothness, however, has no kinship with the pohsh of Raphael, which was a man- nerism applied to everything. The earlier "■ Forge of Vulcan" shows a more evident workmanship though it is nowhere rough or sweeping, and you may note several instances of brushing across the shape of the Hmb, for Velasquez was never pedantic in his use of principles. "The Spinners" may be quoted as an example of the painter's art of touching accessories broadly, and in this connedion one may look also at the slashing hghts on the horse in the "Equestrian Olivares." The sculptor "Montaries," 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 handHng is obedient to fad and expresses matter before manner. The large,
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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. Lasdy, die management of trees by Velasquez, in his later period, as in "The Avenue " (Prado, 1 1 lo), may be compared in beauty, even to the work of Corot. He has felt to the full the soft, bowery umbrageousness of trees, and has seen that for the most part they cut against the sky with a blurred, vapourous 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.
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CHAPTER VIII.
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 de- velopment of the history of painting. To the eye of the sympathetic modern painter, he seems an explosion of personality as disconnedled with the art that imme- diately followed him as with that which preceded him. I believe that the expert in mannerisms has tried to fix his measuring apparatus upon the pidlures 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 pidure the impression 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 proportions, a stock of patterns, a host of tips for drawing separate limbs and other natural objedls. Nothing astonishes a modern painter more than to see a historian ransack every
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gallery to find a precedent for the style of a hand in a pidlure, rather than admit the 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 ? More- over, a picture cannot be the efficient, the first cause of a picture ; all true art originates in the personal prediledions 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 subjed than at realizing 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 pidlures 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 suffi-
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cient to settle his opinions on the pidures of Velasquez. Upon his return in a following year, he found un- expedied 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 expedt to see the bold, dexterous brusher surpassing even Ribera, Hals, or the mature Rembrandt in the bravura of his handiwork. 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 consummate 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 subjed and the composition. It is a style founded on the pursuit of more than usually just and subtle modelling, a modelling which changes charader 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
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of impression of an objedl to be modelled. It is a style compatible with revision and corredion, for it in no way depends upon the integrity of some arbitrary pattern of 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 affedations of manner. In these pidures nothing seems to interpose 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 modelling ; and through their timidity they leave an impression in a vague state, half true, half realized, a state of fever or of sleepiness. Not nature, but the man's impression of nature, should be complete and definite. Their fear of drawing and modelling is un- founded; in the hands of Velasquez these accomplish- ments never became 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 metier f
Whilst looking at his pidures, one may remember amongst his predecessors and the painters of his choice,
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Caravaggio, Greco, Ribera, Sanchez Coello and notably Titian and Tintoretto. The spirit that animated Caravaggio and Ribera may be seen in the solidity, real form and fine handling of" The Forge of Vulcan" and " The Topers." In Greco you may see something of the simphcity and sober colouring of his single portraits, and in Coello a prophecy of his flesh colours of grey ash quaUty and of his early accuracy in the accessories of dress.
Greco is often spoken of as a man to whom Velasquez was diredlly indebted for his style. While Greco certainly adopted a Spanish gravity of colouring, neither that nor his modelhng 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, " Phihp 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 modelhng of the mouth of this early Velasquez. While Velasquez ripened with age and pradice, 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
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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 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 beauti- ful ; 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 pidures 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 ex- pedled to sympathize with the art of Raphael ; and his outspokenness has been amply repaid in all ages by the frank dislike of all Raphaelites for his own work. We could not wish artists otherwise ; 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 convidions. Painting, in that case, would be abandoned by artistic minds for some field of enterprise which was unattainable by mathematical processes, and which still ofi'ered 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 pidure which is absolutely sincere to the principle of sight of its author
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cannot have been lost upon Velasquez. This portrait stops everyone and communicates the shock of contad: 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 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 ot 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 " Montafies," " 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 " Fran9ois Premier" is shrewdly doubted on the score of likeness in the present day, and Dutch burghers in the past
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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.
A painter may not with impunity take the free generous style of Titian and Rembrandt and correft 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 ecledicism, 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 disorganization 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
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unknown " by Titian in the Louvre, not to speak of " Titian's Mistress," are 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 imagine even Velasquez able to better, but one feels that he, and perhaps he alone, could have corredled a certain hardness in the modelling of " L'homme au gant " and an unwise precision in certain lines of the glove, hair, etc.
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CHAPTER IX.
TO see the Prado is to modify one's opinion of the novelty of recent art. Landscape and landscape with figure may be more indepen- dent of the past, but figure painting certainly owes much to Velasquez. Whether dircdly or indiredly, whether consciously or unconsciously, artists have decided after half a century of exploration to follow the path of Velasquez. Not that they have plagiarized, 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, his second successor as painter to the king ; in the present century Sir W. Stirling Maxwell, Richard Ford, T. Thore, 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 enthu- siastically of Velasquez in the early portion of the century went little out of their way to understand him.
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Sir David Wilkie preferred " The Topers " to the later work, and John PhiHp, if he learnt anything from Velasquez, learnt from the early pidiures certain receipts in colouring and in handling a brush, but not the courage to work entirely without receipts.
The return to nature of the French Romantics of 1815 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 subjedl, of textures, of detail, of drawing, but never a realism of general aspedl 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 charad:eristic 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 construdlive planes. Of course Duran taught draw- ing, but likely enough his method was not suitable to
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every kind of talent, for he separated drawing from modelling with the brush as little as possible. According to him the whole art of expressing form should progress together and should consist in expressing it, 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 attention to various aspeds 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 charaderistic 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 Lionardo in their attempts to formalize the vague traditions of the past. From this we pass in the books of that same Lionardo to the third stage based on the sciences of perspedlive and anatomy. Relics of the first two stages are still to be found amongst schoolboys who hand down " tips " for drawing men and objedts, and never dream of going to look at any objedl 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 pradlitioner. This rule of thumb tradition grows from various sources, stray personal memories or observations, and fragmentary recolledlions of the work of such schools of first hand study from nature as the Greek and Assyrians. The
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sciences in their turn were very useful to those who would group figures from chic^ cultivate improvement of type, and introduce tumbled and floating figures into great ceiling decorations.
As in Greece, so in later Europe, it was portraiture that kept art sincere and vital. But in spite of that influence, figure subjedls remained long in the con- ventional stage. Lionardo'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 perspeftive, on chiaroscuro, on the value of colours at various distances, on the art of modelling, which he describes as too often consisting 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 diredlly 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
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Corot ; paint what you see." He wished to diredl 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 without 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 objed: 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
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grasp of the principles of sight. After a sHght search of proportions with charcoal, the places of masses were indicated with a rigger dipped in flowing pigment. No preparation in colour or monochrome was allowed, but the main planes of the face must be laid diredly on the unprepared canvas with a 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 inclinations 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 strudture 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 realize a tone or a passage by some hazardous un- controllable process.
M. Carolus-Duran believed that if you do not approach tone by dire6t 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 effed:
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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 modelling 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 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 asped: of nature. He was pitiless to the transparent colour dodge, the badger- hair hypocrisy, and the hopeful 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 in the " Nineteenth Century," I should have said more of the teaching of a great painter whose only recognized master was Velasquez. There is, however, one point that I must mention, as it throws a light on the simplicity of Velasquez' 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
107
local colour, definitions of detail, refleded lights, or, in fa6l, 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 substances, flesh.
If you will paint the trivial and the uncharacteristic, your picture must be commonplace ; for what affedts us in a picture is that for which it was painted, the things, in fad, for which the asped of the canvas was designed. It is not sufficient 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 efied. 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 pidure. 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 a sense of decoration only is saved this last humiliation of mis- taking trouble for feeling, counting for being impressed, and measuring for seeing. He knows that every extra marking on a canvas is a 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 pidures of that date. It was an easy task to seize on the excuse for these coloured spots, a difficult one to
108
embrace the relations of the ensemble that reduced them to their true insignificance. The ornaments of an exaggerated colouring may be compared to the graces of rhyme in an accented language, such as English. Dignity stumbles over these recurrent ob- stacles, 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 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 realization of plein-air effedls. Thus, the path pursued by men of the present century, though by no means identical, passes through similar stages and progressions. Deco- rative formulas, and the successive realism of various separate qualities, subjed:, form, colour, and atmo- sphere, 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 landscape. 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,
109
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 subjeds 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 morbid Japanese grace with the Spanish austerity of impression, and saw things with a raffines attradlion to elegance, and the quintessence of modishness. In " The Nodurnes," 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.
I lO
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CHAPTER X.
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 effedt, for arrangements to fill a given space. Great painters of all schools from Lionardo 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 overhauled 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
1 1 1
and a head source of idealism, rose from the bowels of nature, springing, it is true, from another soil than Velasquez, from the objedtive rather than the subje6live position. He grubbed into the depths of anatomy and studied nature as it was concerning himself com- paratively little with its aspedl 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 Hfe whilst filling a panel, to recreate in the subtle strudlures of the eye vibrations of a long hereditary past and to recommend a present sentiment to the spedlator'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 He 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 intelled: put into the work. Could any fool do it ? Now, in this matter of depict- ing 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 com- petitors.
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
I 12
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 most tied to representation of the arts seems indeed a non-sense.
Yet one cannot help feeling some sympathy v^^ith those w^ho start on this hopeless cruise, who wreck, the ship whilst steering to some visionary island of spiritualism. They are as those who dream of ideal love, and yet forgive no shortcoming, and persistently despise and misuse ordinary human affedions, as those who wish for a perfedl society and cannot take pains to understand their own day or their own country. This temperament is ruinous to the artist. He negledts 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 conditions — of fa6t, 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 subjedis 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
113 Q.
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 objeds. Indeed, he is not biassed by that chief disturber of impression, the knowledge that any objedls exist; in fa6t, 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 pidiure which looks strange to them, and the illogical dictionary of small objeds 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 Lionardo. He describes how the limbs disappear first, the neck and head next, as the distance increases, until you are aware only of an oblong splash. But pradice lagged long behind theory, and there are painters to- day, especially in England, who would not paint the real appearance of an objed at diiferent distances. They are behind the scenes, as it were, and, knowing
114
that they are to produce a horse, they paint it exadlly as they have studied it near at hand, only they make it small, like a toy, because it is far off. Some hundred years ago they would have refused even that conces- sion to the then strange and novel art of perspedlive. These toy boats on the sea, these toy cows in the meadows, these toy soldiers in the battle-field, are not big things seen far off, but little miniatures near at hand, compelled by perspedive 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 effedl. Such rude compilations of objefts, studied at different focuses, are easily shown to be logically defeftive, but it is less easy to perceive the more subtle disaster incurred by a similar fault in figure subjeds, 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 definition. 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 perspedtive.
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
1^5
so, and, because it then fails to give a truthful impres- sion 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 per- spediive, 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 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 conviClion of the true aspedt of the ensemble was sufficiently strong to prevent him from executing his pidture 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 conscious- ness 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.
ii6
To shift that focus to make that field larger or smaller is to destroy the mood which produced the impression.
If a card board 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 it becomes difficult to embrace as a whole more than such a small bit of it as would cover the whole card board 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 conven- tional line of treatment. Many realists, however, would paint the scene covered by the card board held at ten inches fi-om the eye by adding together innu- merable little impressions ol fields covered by the card board 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 stridt rules in such matters of feeling as the width of an area of impression would be to fetter pradlice, but it is curious to note that Lionardo, centuries ago, suggested that the painter should be supposed to stand at a distance from his pidture of three times its largest measurement. It was Lionardo
117
also who proposed to show the effedt of distance on local colour by painting on a sheet of glass held up before the subjed; 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 defini- tion, do justice to the myriad delicacies of detail, 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 effedl of the more important markings. By varying his distance from the pane the experimenter may convince himself that the difiiculties 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 these more evident exigencies he must allow something for personal feeling. He will find out how to realize on canvas the impression of some obje6t, 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
ii8
the mind, but a space nevertheless necessary to impart some quahty or some meaning to the chief objed:.
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 further 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 realized pradlically, and then only mechanical difficulties are removed. The problems of how to employ modelling, relative forces of definition, and range of colour, in treating scenes of various widths, depths, and fulness of interest, still remain to 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 im- pressionism, discriminate their meanings, and certainly those who paint impressionistically will not confound their pradlice 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 subjeft. Others hold that whatever else it may do, it must represent, like an instantaneous photograph, passing movements by blotches and blurrs, 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
119
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 distindiion of subjedl has been shown on an earlier page to have little weight in the art of painting ; and one may observe that, after courtly subjedls are exhausted, this bastard realism of motif is confined to low life. Nevertheless, there is a realism, not literary, but pidtorial ; the realism of treatment which is applicable to any subjedt, religious, mythological, heroic, courtly, or lowlived, even to still life and landscape. Orpheus, Endymion, Hope, Love, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or a man digging potatoes, may any of them be conceived realistically, and painted from the model. But when we admit this, and discriminate realism of subjedl 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 idealize form and yet paint it under a realistic efFedt. In fad:, 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 efFecft, of local colour, of atmosphere, of values, and all and any of these are pidtorial in their nature.
Now, impressionism allows many and divers impressions, but each records a truth of general aspedt. The whole effed: 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 impressionist \ but we name them after the prevailing
1 20
intention of their works. The difference between realism and impressionism may be illustrated out of the past by the contrast between the Eclediics and the Naturalisti 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 impossible to finish a pidlure. 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 shoidd be blue and broad, hot and speclded, and certainly all the mystery, grandeur, or deHcacy of the natural model painted out in commonplace. Again and again he tries, and each time that he brings a fresh eye to bear upon the model, he finds that all its charafteristic beauty has evaporated from his work. He may never attempt to enter upon completeness, he is kept in the ante-room of preHminary changes.
Now, all his separate observations may have been true, but they were all made under different conditions of attention to the scene ; whereas, until every part of the pidlure has been observed in subservience to the impression of the whole, completeness can never be
121
even begun. The largeness, the dignity, the swim of nature seen under a distributed attention is continually contradidled 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, according to the concentration or diffusion of the sight. Every one knows that when a shadow is looked at alone it appears more full of colours than when the surround- ing 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 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 impression 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 finishing a pidure. 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 aspeds if one should try to learn anything particular from
122
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 impression- ism, and Velasquez has not been sufficiently, or at any rate rightly, admired. Many painters and writers of influence have condemned impressionism in a manner which showed that they neither knew nor cared anything 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 ex- pelled 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 ot 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 won- derful that people so taught saw only one side of the art of Velasquez, and that their system of teaching is
123
now abandoned for one which has been, to a large extent, based on the praftice of the great Spanish impressionist.
124
ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS.
These illustrations have been reproduced from photographs taken expressly for this work from the " Prado Series," published by Messrs. Laurent of Madrid. As they are included here for purposes of reference, for which a faithful record of the present state of the paintings is most valuable, no attempt has been made to restore or modify the details.
THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. PR ADO. EARLY STYLE. 16:9.
II.
THE ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS. NATIONAL GALLERY. EARLY STYLE.
III.
PHII-IP IV., YOUNG. PRADO. EARLY
STYLE. Circa 1623-4.
IV.
THE SO-CALLED "DAUGHTER OF VELASOUEZ." PRADOT 1626.
PHILIP IV. PRADO. EARLY STYLE.
VI.
DONA MARIA, DAUGHTER OF PHILIP III. PRADO. Circa 1630.
VII.
VIEW IN THE GARDEN OF THE VILLA MEDICI, ROME. PRADO. Circa ib^o.
VIII.
VIEW IN THE GARDEN OF THE VILLA MEDICI, ROME. PRADO. Circa ib^o.
IX.
PHILIP IV. AS A SPORTS- MAN. PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD.
X.
THE ADMIRAL ADRIAN PULIDO FARFJA. NATIONAL GALLERY. MIDDLE PERIOD. 1639.
XL
THE CRUCIFIXION PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD. 1639.
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THE DWARF "EL PRIMO." PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD.
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EQUESTRIAN PORTRAIT OF DON BALTHAZAR CARLOS. PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD.
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XX.
DON PEDRO DE AL- TAMIRA. LOUVRE. MIDDLE PERIOD.
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XXI.
COUNT DE BENA- VENTE. PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD.
XXII.
THE SCULPTOR MARTI- NEZ MONTANES, ONCE CALLED ALONSO CANO. PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD.
XXIII.
PABLILLOS EL DE VALLADO- LID, ALSO CALLED A BUFFOON, AN ACTOR, AND A RHETOR. PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD.
XXIV.
PHILIP IV. CALLED THE ERAGA PORTRAIT. DULWICH GALLERY. MIDDLE PERIOD. 1644.
XXV.
DONA JUANA PACHECO, CALLED THE WIEE OF VELASgUEZ. PRADO.
XXVI.
PORTRAIT. UN- KNOWN MAN. PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD.
XXVII.
A BETROTHAL. NATIONAL GALLERY. LATE MIDDLE STYLE .?
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A BUFFOON, CALLED "DON JUAN DE AUS- TRIA." PRADO. LATE STYLE ?
XXX.
POPE INNOCENT X.
Circa 1 650.
XXXI.
THE GOD MARS. PRADO. LATE STYLE ?
XXXII.
THE DWARF "EL BOBO DE CORIA." AN IDIOT. PRADO. MIDDLE PERIOD?
XXXIII.
THE DWARF SEBAS- TIAN . DE MORRA. PRADO.
XXXIV.
CRISTOBAL DE PERNIA, CALLED "BABARROJA." PRADO. LATE STYLE.
XXXV.
MARIANA DE AUSTRIA, SECOND WIFE OF PHILIP IV. PRADO. LATE STYLE.
XXXVI.
MARIANA DE AUSTRIA \T PRAYERS. PRADO. LATE STYLE.
XXXVII.
M()p:nippus
PRADO. LATE STYLE.
XXXVIII.
^SOPUS. PRADO. LATE STYLE.
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LAS MENINAS, ONCE CALLEI) "LA EAMI- LIA." PRADO. LATE STYLE. 1656.
XL.
THE DWARF CALLED
"ANTONIO elinc;lese."
PRADO. LATE STYLE.
XLI.
PHILIP IV. OLD. NATIONAL GALLERY. LATE STYLE.
XLII.
ST. ANTHONY VISITING ST. PAUL. PRADO. LATE STYLE.
XLIII.
LA INFANTA DONA MAR- GARITA MARIA. LOUVRE. LATE STYLE. Circa 1659.
CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.
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Library Bureau Cat. no. 1137
1
fTn-
75WGWsa
ARTn
3 5002 00091 1821
Stevenson, Robert Alan Mowbray The art of Velasquez,
Art ND 813 . V4 S7 1895
Stevenson, Robert Alan Mowbray, 1847-1900.
The art of Velasquez
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