Promenades of an Impressionist Part 16

Some prefer Las Hilanderas in the outer gallery. After the stately equestrian series, the Philip, the Olivares, the Baltasar Carlos; after the bust portraits of Philip in the Prado and in the National Gallery, the hunting series; after the Crucifixion and its sombre background, you return to The Spinners and wonder anew. Its subt.i.tle might be: Variations on the Theme of Sunshine. In it the painter pursues the coloured adventures of a ray of light. Rhythmically more involved and contrapuntal than The Maids, this canvas, with its brilliant broken lights, its air that circulates, its tender yet potent conducting of the eye from the rounded arm of the seductive girl at the loom to the arched area with its leaning, old-time ba.s.s-viol, its human figures melting dream-like into the tapestried background, arouses within the spectator much more complicated _etats d'ame_ than does Las Meninas. The silvery sorceries of that picture soothe the spirit and pose no riddles; The Spinners is a cathedral crammed with implications. Is it not the last word of the art of Velasquez--though it preceded The Maids? Will the eye ever tire of its glorious gloom, its core of tonal richness, its virile exaltation of everyday existence? Is it only a trick of the wrist, a deft blending of colours by this artist, who has been called, wrongfully--the "Shakespeare of the brush"? Is all this nothing more than "distinguished"?

Mr. Ricketts justly calls Las Lanzas the unique historic picture.

Painted at the very flush of his genius, painted with sympathy for the conquered and the conqueror--Velasquez accompanied the Marquis of Spinola to Italy--this Surrender of Breda has received the homage of many generations. Sir Joshua Reynolds a.s.serted that the greatest picture at Rome was the Velasquez head of Pope Innocent X in the Doria Palace (a variant is in the Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg). What would he have said in the presence of this captivating evocation of a historic event? The battle pieces of Michael Angelo, Da Vinci, and t.i.tian are destroyed; Las Lanzas remains a testimony to the powers of imaginative reconstruction and architectonic of Velasquez. It is the most complete, the most natural picture in the world. The rhythms of the bristling lances are syncopated by a simple device; they are transposed to another plane of perspective, there in company with a lowered battle standard. The acute rhythms of these spears has given to the picture its t.i.tle of The Lances, and never was t.i.tle more appropriate. The picture is at once a decorative arabesque, an ensemble of tones, and a slice of history. Spinola receives from the conquered Justin of Na.s.sau the keys of the beleagured Breda. Velasquez creates two armies out of eight figures, a horse and fourteen heads--here is the recipe of Degas for making a mult.i.tude carried to the height of the incredible. His own portrait, that of a grave, handsome man, may be seen to the right of the big horse.

The first period of his art found Velasquez a realist heavy in colour and brush-work, and without much hint of the transcendental realism to be noted in his later style. The dwarfs, buffoons, the aesop and the Menippus are the result of an effortless art. In the last manner the secret of the earth mingles with the mystery of the stars, as Dostoevsky would put it. The Topers, The Forge of Vulcan, are pictures that enthrall because of their robust simplicity and vast technical sweep though they do not possess the creative invention of the Mercury and Argus or The Anchorites. This latter is an amazing performance. Two hermits--St. Antony the Abbot visiting St. Paul the Hermit--are shown. A flying raven, bread in beak, nears them. You could swear that the wafer of flour is pasted on the canvas. This picture breathes peace and sweetness. The Christ of the Spaniard is a man, not a G.o.d, crucified. His Madonnas, masterly as they are, do not reach out hands across the frame as do his flower-like royal children and delicate monsters.

The crinolined princess, Margarita, with her spangles and furbelows, is a companion to the Margarita at the Louvre and the one in Vienna.

She is the exquisite and lyric Velasquez. On his key-board of imbricated tones there are grays that felicitously sing across alien strawberry tints, thence modulate into fretworks of dim golden fire.

As a landscapist Velasquez is at his best in the Prado. The various backgrounds and those two views painted at Rome in the garden of the Villa Medici--a liquid comminglement of Corot and Constable, as has been pointed out--prove this man of protean gifts to have antic.i.p.ated modern discoveries in vibrating atmospheric effects and colour-values.

But, then, Velasquez will always be "modern." And when time has obliterated his work he may become the legendary Parrhasius of a vanished epoch. To see him in the Prado is to stand eye to eye with the most enchanting realities of art.

_CODA_

When a man begins to chatter of his promenades among the masterpieces it may be a.s.sumed that he has crossed the sill of middle-age. Remy de Gourmont, gentle ironist, calls such a period _l'heure insidieuse_.

Yet, is it not something--a vain virtue, perhaps--to possess the courage of one's windmills! From the Paris of the days when I haunted the ateliers of Gerome, Bonnat, Meissonier, Couture, and spent my enthusiasms over the colour-schemes of Decamps and Fortuny, to the Paris of the revolutionists, Manet, Degas, Monet, now seems a life long. But time fugues precipitately through the land of art. In reality both periods overlap; the dichotomy is spiritual, not temporal.

The foregoing memoranda are frankly in the key of impressionism. They are a record of some personal preferences, not attempts at critical revaluations. Appearing first in the New York _Sun_, the project of their publication in book form met with the approbation of its proprietor, William Mackay Laffan, whose death in 1909 was an international loss to the Fine Arts. If these opinions read like a medley of hastily crystallised judgments jotted down after the manner of a traveller pressed for time, they are none the less sincere. My garden is only a straggling weedy plot, but I have traversed it with delight; in it I have promenaded my dearest prejudices, my most absurd illusions. And central in this garden may be found the image of the supreme illusionist of art, Velasquez.

Since writing the preceding articles on El Greco and Velasquez the museum of the Hispanic Society, New York, has been enabled, through the munificent generosity of Mr. Archer M. Huntington, to exhibit his newly acquired El Grecos and a Velasquez. The former comprise a brilliantly coloured Holy Family, which exhales an atmosphere of serenity; the St. Joseph is said to be a portrait of El Greco; and there also is a large canvas showing Christ with several of his disciples. Notable examples both. The Velasquez comes from the collection of the late Edouard Kann and is a life-size bust portrait of a sweetly grave little girl. Senor Beruete believes her to represent the daughter of the painter Mazo and his wife, Francisca Velasquez, therefore a granddaughter of Velasquez. The tonalities of this picture are subtly beautiful, the modelling mysterious, the expression vital and singularly child-like. It is a fitting companion to a portrait hanging on the same wall, that of the aristocratic young Cardinal Pamphili, a nephew of Pope Innocent X, also by the great Spaniard.

BOOKS BY JAMES HUNEKER

MEZZOTINTS IN MODERN MUSIC

BRAHMS, TSCHAKOWSKY, CHOPIN, RICHARD STRAUSS, LISZT AND WAGNER

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MELOMANIACS

Contents: The Lord's Prayer in B--A Son of Liszt--A Chopin of the Gutter--The Piper of Dreams--An Emotional Acrobat--Isolde's Mother--The Rim of Finer Issues--An Ibsen Girl--Tannhauser's Choice--The Red-Headed Piano Player--Brynhud's Immolation--The Quest of the Elusive--An Involuntary Insurgent--Hunding's Wife--The Corridor of Time--Avatar--The Wegstaffes give a Musicale--The Iron Virgin--Dusk of the G.o.ds--Siegfried's Death--Intermezzo--A Spinner of Silence--The Disenchanted Symphony--Music the Conqueror.

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VISIONARIES