phors, to be painted con leche y sangre, with milk and bloodwe should have preferred roses- as none ever drew better those fairest productions of nature and fit offerings to the purest of virgins. He was fond of heightening tender tones by the contrast of brown veils, sunburnt and tawny men, and their toasted and bronzed hides; these he realised with a local brown, a negro de hueso, or colour prepared by himself from the burnt bones of the olla and it is made to this day by the artists of Seville; nor was he afraid of white linen near his tender fleshes, knowing that they would stand the perilous juxtaposition. For his drawings, which are very rare, he worked with the reed pen, tinting them with liquorice instead of bistre; in painting he used the finest materials, and especially ultramarines; his rich yellows and delicate peach blossom pinks are peculiar, and often were introduced instead of whites, to give nearness. His shadows are rather lessened light and sobered colour than black incorporations; thrown by him, they seem real, mutable, accidental, and aerial, and as passing between the eye and object. His cast of draperies was purely Spanish; he excelled in portrait whenever he attempted it: but living far from courts, religious subjects were more in demand; and so too, an inhabitant of the city, not country, architecture took precedence with him of landscape; he revelled in no Titianesque lapis-lazuli skies, no heaven-gilding Lorraine sunsets; his pale and grey backgrounds served as accessories to aid the telling effect of his figures; but pure landscapes by him scarcely can be said to exist: those which are passed off as such are usually the works of Antolinez or Iriarte, who, he said, was fit to paint the scenery of heaven; for Murillo was too great for petty jealousies and could well afford to praise. He often repeated himself, and simply because, employed by the public, he rarely produced a picture without many wishing to have a duplicate. The enormous number of works, of which Mr. Stirling has given a curious and careful catalogue, were the fruits of a long and industrious life neither broken by travelling nor frittered away by the vanities of courts and ambition. He devoted himself with single-heartedness to nature, and she has rewarded her true disciple with immortality. Chronologically speaking, Murillo should have been noticed after Velazquez, who has been reserved for the last, because the greatest of the painters of Spain, and, in some respects, of any country. Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez was born at Seville, and baptized there June 6th, 1599. Placed early under Herrera he caught his bold manner, which he improved by a far higher touch and intention: he next became a pupil of Pacheco, whose daughter he married. Feeling that such a master could do do nothing for his art, and thrown on himself, Velazquez, during the five years of his Jacob-like servitude, turned to Nature for instruction, and procured a peasant lad for model, whom he drew in every shape, and thus mastered the human form—not indeed of the best-selected quality. In 1662, yearning for what he felt was in him, he visited Madrid, where he settled the year following, and at once became famous. His whole career, from its opening to its end, was one of well-deserved uninterrupted prosperity. He was distinguished throughout by the patronage and friendship of Philip II., who not only appointed him court painter, but placed him in office immediately about the royal person, then the most coveted honour in Spain. Velazquez twice visited Italy, in 1629 and 1648, remaining absent each time about two years. But the sight of Raphael and Michael Angelo wrought no change in his style, and he candidly confessed to Salvator Rosa that his sympathies were all with the Venetian colourists; nay, as if to show his independent nationality, and predetermined fixity of purpose, he painted in the Vatican itself some of his most naturalist pictures. He was too sure of his own peculiar power, to abandon substance to catch at the shadow of others' excellence. Again, when Rubens came to Madrid, in 1628, neither his bravura nor rich impasto effected any influence on Velazquez. The sinewy barb of Andalusia turned away from the flabby cart-mares of Flanders. Velazquez, having wasted hours precious to art in offices which any Polonius or Lord Fanny could have performed, eventually lost his life through them. In 1660, he was sent to the frontiers of France, to prepare the royal quarters at the ill-omened marriage of Maria Teresa with Louis XIV. Worn out with fatigue he returned, July 31st, to Madrid: to die there August 7th; his wife followed him a week afterwards, and rested in the same grave until the French disturbed their ashes.* Such is the unimportant biography of one whose name is immortal, and of whom all talk familiarly, however imperfectly acquainted with the range of his claims. It is at Madrid alone that he is to be surveyed in all his glory. Grievous is the error of those who suppose him only to be the portrait-painter of sallow mustachioed Spaniards in black cloaks. There is no branch of the art, except the marine, which this Proteus has not pursued, and he attained almost equal excellence in all. His portraits, however, baffle description and praise; they must be seen: and they cannot be seen without shaming the Cockneys who speak of portraiture * Murillo fared no better: when Soult, the Verres of Andalusia, ruled at Seville, the churches in which Bartolomé was baptized and buried were destroyed, and his bones cast to the winds; his works were transported' to Paris in the wholesale, and those regorged in 1815 went back defiled by harpy cleaners. as as something quite unworthy of being classed with or compared to High Art." He drew the minds of men: they live, breathe, and seem ready to walk out of the frames. The dead come forth conjured up; we behold what written history cannot give their actual semblance in life; his power of painting circumambient air, his knowledge of lineal and aërial perspective, the gradation of tones in light, shadow, and colour, give an absolute concavity to the flat surface of his canvas; we look into space, into a room, into the reflection of a mirror. The freshness, individuality, and identity of every person are quite startling. After a few days spent in the gallery of Madrid, we fancy that we have been acquainted with the royal family and court of that day-that we have lived with them. Velazquez was the Vandyck of Madrid. He caught the high-bred suggestive look of the hidalgo, his grave demeanour and severe costume, with an excellence equal to his Flemish rival-but he would not condescend to flatter even royalty-honesty was his policy. Courts could not make a courtier of his eye, which saw everything as it really was, and his hand, that obeyed his eye, gave the exact form and pressure. He rarely refined he did not stoop to conciliate and woo either sitter or spectator. Even when the subject is disagreeable, we are forced to submit to the mastery displayed in the representation. But, in fact, however ordinary his subjects, he never was vulgar; he deals, if you will, in prose-but it is always a prose in which you recognize the nervous Thucidydean terseness. His Infantes are often booby-faced, and his Infantas mealymouthed, for the royal originals were made, not by him, but by Nature's journeymen: still they are real beings, not conventional; they are flesh and blood, our fellow-creatures, and with them therefore we sympathise. Their costume, whether of the saloon or the chase, is equally true; and they wear their clothes with ease and fitness, not like the masquerade of a fancy shop stuck on a stiff lay-figure. Velazquez was inferior to Vandyck in representing female beauty, for he had not the Fleming's advantages: the Oriental jealousy of the Spaniard revolted at any female portraiture, and still more at any display of beauteous form: the royal ladies, almost the only exception, were unworthy models, while the use of rouge disfigured their faces, and the enormous petticoats masked their proportions. Velazquez was emphatically a man, and the painter of men. He was aware of his strength and weakness: his greatest works-Las Lanzas, Los Bebedores--have no women in them whatever; and in the Hilanderas, a group of females, he has turned aside the principal head in the background, leaving it, like Timanthes, to be supplied by the imagination of the spectator. He was moreover a painter only of the visible tangible tangible beings on earth, not the mystical glorified spirits of heaven: he required to touch before he could believe-a fulcrum for his mighty lever: he was a man of strong genius but no enthusiast; Nature was his guide, truth his delight, man his model. No Virgin ever descended into his studio; no cherubs hovered around his palette: he did not work for priest or ecstatic anchorite, but for plumed kings and booted knights. We have therefore but little to say for his holy and mythological picturesholy, like those of Carravaggio, in nothing but name: groups rather of low life, and that so truly painted, that truth for once is offensive. His Mars is a mere porter; his demigods, vulgar Galicians; his Virgin, a Maritornes, without the womanly tenderness of Murillo, the unspotted loveliness of Raphael, or the serenity, unruffled by earthly passions, of the antique. His pictures of this class are, however, very few, and therein is his marked difference from all other Spanish artists, who, painting for the church, comparatively neglected everything but the religious and legendary. In things mortal and touching man, Velazquez was more than mortal: he is perfect throughout, whether painting high or low, rich or poor, young or old, human, animal, or natural objects. His dogs are equal to Snyders; his chargers to Rubens-they know their rider, prancing under knights, and ambling under ladies fair. When he descended from heroes, his beggars and urchins rivalled Murillo: while the waggish wassail of his drunkards shows how much less repulsive such subjects, if he had ever repeated them, would have been in his hands than in those of a Dutchman. Nor, if he had devoted himself to landscape, would Spain have wanted her Poussin or Wilson: for, as Wilkie * truly says, his scenes are full of the 'very air we breathe'--local colour, freshness, and daylight, whether verdurous court-like avenues or wild rocky solitudes. Lastly, his historical pictures are pearls of great price; never were knights and soldiers so painted as in his Surrender of Breda. His style was based on Herrera, Carravaggio, Ribera, and Stanzioni-an assimilation of all, not a servile imitation of any; while his conceptions were new, fresh, and entirely his own. His drawing was admirable, correct, and unconstrained; his execution, technical skill, and mastery over his materials complete; his colouring was clear and clean, and laid on at once with single projection of mind; he seldom used mixed tints; he painted with long brushes, and often as coarsely as floor-cloth; but the effects *‘Although,' says Wilkie (Life, ii, 519), he lived before (!) the time of Claude and Salvator Rosa.' Amateurs may well smile when artists are ignorant that these three great painters were contemporaries and friends. The landscapes which Velazquez purchased of Claude are still at Madrid, while his conversations with Salvator were printed in 1660 by Boschini, p. 56. Carta del Navegar. when when seen from the intended distance are magical, everything coming out into its proper place, form, and tone. Yet no man was ever more sparing of colour; he husbanded his whites, which, like Rubens, he thought poison except in lights, and even his yellows, which tell up sparkling like gold on his under-toned backgrounds: these, especially in his landscapes, were cool greys, skies, and misty mornings-nature seen with the intervention of air. He painted with a rapid, flowing, and certain brush, as by mere volition, and with that ease, the test of perfection, that seeming absence of art and effort, which made all imagine that they could do the same-until they tried, and despaired. The results obtained are so true to nature, that first beholders, as with Raphael at the Vatican, are sometimes disappointed that there is nothing more. He was above all tricks. There is no masking poverty of hand or mind under meretricious glitter; all is in sober, real, sterling simplicity. No painter was more objective. There is no showing off-no calling attention to the performer's dexterity: his mind was in his subject, into which he passed his whole soul. He clearly conceived his idea, and worked it rapidly out with directness of aim, unity, and compression of composition; he knew what he wanted and-which few dowhen he had got it: then he left off, and never frittered away his breadth or emphasis by torturing details or superfluous finish to mere accessories. These were dashed in con quatro botti— but true, for he never put brush to canvas without an intention and meaning: his was the true philosophy of art-the selection of essentials-of all that first and last attracts and addresses itself to the eye, mind, and heart of spectators-whom he left to infer the secondary:-Aquila non captat muscas. Velazquez and Murillo are the true representatives of the arts and nationalities of Spain; one portrays the haughty foredoomed court, the other the monacal Mariolatrous province: well might Wilkie assert that these two only will do in England;' to see them, and them alone, was the end of our Canny Dawvid's' pilgrimage to the Peninsula. Short-lived, alas, have the fine arts been there, and few the master minds who arrived at excellence, by paths separate indeed and impervious to mediocrity, but revealed to each by his own light within. Both were genuine Spaniards, and they differ more in degree than kind: if Velazquez be the Homer, Demosthenes, and Dante of the Spanish studio-Murillo is its Virgil, Cicero, and Tasso; the one, all simplicity, power, and action, carries everything before him by force of intellect, pith, and savour of manhood, and burning focus concentration; the other fascinates learned and unlearned alike, by persuasive feeling, gentleness, and attractive colour. Both formed epochs, and left models from which pedants cull rules and theories; but never again |