Velazquez Part 1

Velazquez.

by S. L. Bensusan.

INTRODUCTION

[Ill.u.s.tration: Velazquez]

It is a curious truth that Spain in these days of her decline exercises almost as much control over the mind of the world as she exercised over its territories in the days of her great empire. Cervantes in literature and Velazquez in art seem destined to secure for their country a measure of immortality that throws into the background the memory of such people as Carlos Quinto, Philip II., and those other lesser lights who made the name of Spain respected or detested throughout Europe and South America. If science and art are destined, as some altruists hope, to unite the world in a bond that defies the arbitrary boundaries made by rulers, then the name of Diego de Silva Velazquez will stand high in the list of those whom the world delights to honour, for people who are opposed diametrically on all questions of politics and faith find ground upon which they may meet in security and amity when they stand before the pictures of the great Spanish master.

And Cervantes, who used words instead of colours to express the life he saw around him, would redeem Spain from insignificance if she had never owned a colony, and had never sought to step beyond her own borders to develop the arts of peace or follow the paths of war.

Perhaps it would be hard to find more diverse opinions than those that are heard in the studio. Artists see life through the medium of many temperaments, they are notoriously intemperate in their enthusiasms.

There are schools of painting to suit every conviction, and the work that one man would give his all to possess would not find hanging s.p.a.ce upon the wall controlled by another. But before Velazquez even artists forget their controversies; he stands, like Bach and Beethoven in the world of music, respected even by those who do not understand. No controversy rages round him; he has marched unchallenged to the highest place in men's regard.

PLATE II.--LAS MENInAS

This picture was painted about the year 1656, and, now in the Prado, is considered one of the greatest works of the master. It presents the Infanta Margarita attended by her maids of honour, while Velazquez himself is shown painting the portraits of Philip IV. and his second wife Mariana of Austria, who are seen reflected in the mirror.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate II.]

It is interesting to note that a reputation unrivalled in the world of pictures is founded upon a comparatively small number of works. One of his latest critics reduces the pictures of Velazquez now in existence to eighty-nine, while acknowledging that some have disappeared from the royal palaces of Spain and cannot be traced. This critic, Senor Don Aureliano de Beruete--a connoisseur, a collector, and a worker in the best interests of art--is perhaps a little too severe. He will not admit to his catalogue a portrait like that of Admiral Adriano Pulido Pareja, which, despite some inferior workmanship, can show considerable claims to be regarded as genuine; but even if all the disputed ones were admitted, and such a list as the late R. A. M. Stevenson published were accepted without that far-seeing critic's own reserve, we should not have as many pictures to represent the forty years of the artist's life as Sir Joshua Reynolds was known to paint in a single year.

Velazquez has left very few drawings, and these are of small importance; there are but two acknowledged engravings; and to limit still further our sources of knowledge, the artist's correspondence seems to have been lost; while the Memoirs which Velazquez was said to have drawn up when Philip IV. sent the pictures to the Escorial are now admitted by the best authorities to be the work of another man.

I

THE METHOD AND INFLUENCE OF VELAZQUEZ

In dealing with the life and work of the Spanish master, even in the modest fashion of this little monograph, one must bear in mind the fact that Velazquez, in the eyes of his contemporaries, was not only an artist--he was a court painter; and pictures other than portraits were of comparatively little importance to Philip IV. and his circle. Art borrowed most of her importance in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain from the fact that she was the handmaid of Holy Mother Church.

Velazquez was a court official who chanced to be a clever portrait-painter, and his promotion tended ever to take him further away from his art. With the increase of state duties the claims upon his time grew more and more difficult to meet, and, when he rose in the closing years of his life to be Grand Marshal of the Palace, entrusted with the ordering of state functions and missions to distinguished foreigners, his art became entirely a secondary consideration. The studio was no more than a place of refuge for the artist in the hours when he might forget that he was an official. If Velazquez had not been compelled to sacrifice the best part of forty years' activity to the ridiculous formalities of court life, the world might have been richer to-day by scores of pictures worthy to rank by the side of "Las Meninas" and the portrait of Pope Innocent X. The painter might have found outside court circles far more inspiring sitters than those whom he was compelled to paint, for it takes all that even a Velazquez can give to a portrait to make a Philip IV., a Mariana of Austria, or even an Isabella of Bourbon, reveal their dominant characteristics without caricature; indeed one feels that the interest belongs to the picture and not to the sitter. The success is one of tone, of harmony and of line, of sure handling directed by an inward vision.

Because of gifts lying beyond praise, the painter has preserved seventeenth-century Spain for us as far as court circles represent it; but among the many charges laid to the account of Philip IV. must be added that of limiting the range and crippling the capacity of an artist who cannot be placed second to any man.

When we come to a.n.a.lyse his work we find that its qualities are not of a sensational kind. Velazquez makes no appeal through the medium of brilliant pigment; his great contemporary Rubens used colour in far more striking fashion. Velazquez loved grey and silvery tints, and in the years of his maturity understood relative values perfectly. He knew, too, exactly how far he could go, and never made experiments in search of qualities that were not his. Although he had a certain quality of delicate imagination, he was a realist, and could not paint without a model; he never acquired a mannerism, or applied to one sitter the treatment that some artists seem to keep for types. Every figure he set upon canvas has its own individuality, and, while Velazquez, like other artists, had manners and methods that belong to fixed periods of his life, it is not easy to set down in cold print an a.n.a.lysis of the causes that make up his effects. He had no tricks; everything that he did was clear, simple, and withal inimitable.

Hundreds of men have copied his pictures; none has been able to copy his method. With his death his influence upon art ceased. His genius lay buried in the grave with him, and did not suffer complete resurrection until the nineteenth century was turning towards its successor, though Raphael Mengs had done all he could to make his merits known a hundred years before. Even to-day, we may be said to be in the first stage of our enjoyment of the master's work. There are at least fifty good books upon the subject of Velazquez' life and art, written in three or four languages, and all published in the last half century; there must be many more to come, for every generation sees genius in the light of its own time.

So much for literature. In art the painter has influenced very many moderns. Manet, Courbet, Corot, Millet, Whistler, are among the men whose work shines in the light of the Prado, and the list might be prolonged indefinitely, for all earnest art workers go to Velazquez, confident that whatever their aims and ideals, he will confirm and strengthen what is best in them. They know, too, that they may return again and again, and that the rich stores of guidance and encouragement in the pursuit of ideals are as inexhaustible as the barrel of meal that did not waste, and the cruse of oil that did not fail, in the house of the widow of Zarephath.

II

THE PAINTER'S EARLY DAYS

In the years when Velazquez first saw the light, the power of Spain, despite the shock it had received from British seamen, was the dominating factor in European politics. Philip II. had come to the end of a reign of more than forty years; Philip III. had just reached the throne. The painter was not born in the atmosphere of court life, but in the very Catholic city of Seville, then as now a fatal place for those who cannot withstand the manifold temptations to lead a lazy life. Happily for the boy his parents had not inherited the Seville traditions; his father came from Oporto, which, being a seaport town, has no lack of mental and physical activity. The spirit of painting settled at a very early age upon young Diego de Silva Velazquez--the second name by which he is universally known belonged to his mother's family--almost before he was in his teens he was working in the studio of Francisco de Herrera, architect and painter. The temperaments of master and pupil could not fuse; there was sufficient trouble to lead Don Juan Rodriguez to transfer his son's services to Francesco Pacheco, painter, poet, professor, and withal a man of action and experience.

He knew much about contemporary art, encouraged a hopeful outlook upon life, and enjoyed the respect of all men. Moreover his studio was the meeting-place for many of the distinguished folk of the city. In the very early years of their a.s.sociation Pacheco understood that his young pupil was not like other lads, that he possessed an individuality that could not be repressed or directed into the usual channels, and instead of resenting this new element, he sought to direct it wisely and kindly, thereby laying Velazquez under a debt of grat.i.tude that the painter never repudiated. Indeed there were stronger ties in the making, for in the spring of 1618, when the young artist was on the threshold of his wonderful career, Pacheco gave him his daughter Juana for wife, "encouraged," he says, "by his virtues, his fine qualities, and the hopes which his happy nature and great talent raised in me."

The kind old painter is not remembered to-day by his pictures, or even by his "Book of Portraits of Ill.u.s.trious Personages," and other quaintly t.i.tled works from his pen. He lives because he helped to make Velazquez a great painter, and recorded his impression of his son-in-law's earliest works, the various "Bodegones," of which several may be seen in London to-day. Others are in Berlin and St. Petersburg.

From these pictures of the secular life Velazquez pa.s.sed to religious subjects--"Christ in the House of Martha" (National Gallery) and the "Adoration of the Magi" (Prado) belong to these early years.

PLATE III.--THE INFANTE PHILIP PROSPER

This picture hangs in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna. It is the work of the painter's last period, and shows us the little son of Philip IV.

by his second wife. The lad died some two years after the picture was painted; it has been restored, not too cleverly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate III.]

In 1622, Velazquez, already the father of two children, made his first journey to Madrid, and was allowed to visit the royal palaces. He did not stay long in Castile, and his return to the capital was brought about by the divinity that shapes men's ends. Philip III. was dead; his son Philip IV. had selected as friend and adviser the Count Olivarez, son of the Governor of the Alcazar in Seville. Olivarez had many friends in the city that wears the "Modo" for its badge, in recognition of unswerving loyalty to Alfonso the Learned. Doubtless he had heard about the work of the young painter and had seen some examples of it, and he wished to strengthen himself in the capital by bringing accomplished men from his own city to official posts in Madrid. So he sent for Velazquez, who journeyed a second time to the north, now in the company of Pacheco, and on arrival there painted a lost portrait of a Gentleman Usher, Fonseca by name. This picture did for Velazquez what the portrait of Admiral Keppel did for Reynolds, and before the excitement died away, the young King Philip IV. had deigned to promise a sitting to the clever Sevillian. The success of the first picture of Philip IV. (apparently the early one now in the Prado) was so complete that the king ordered all existing portraits of himself to be removed from the palace, and gave the painter an order of admission to his service with a salary of about two pounds five shillings a month! Under the skilled hands of the artist we are permitted to see the tall, gloomy lad grow up a dull, reserved man, and we read in his face a part at least of the causes of Spain's ultimate downfall.

III

VELAZQUEZ IN MADRID

Of the painter's work at court in those early days we hear a little from Pacheco, but the story of the times is more or less obscure. A clever portrait-painter was not a very interesting person in the eyes of a Spanish grandee. He was cla.s.sed with the court buffoons and dwarfs who existed merely to amuse. Indeed, portraiture was not above suspicion in the eyes of some fanatics, who held that art existed to serve the Church, and should not seek secular employment. There are doc.u.ments extant showing that Velazquez received eight pounds for three portraits, of which one is lost and the other two (Philip and the Count of Olivarez) are in Spain. In 1625 the painter received a present of three hundred ducats, which was followed by a pension of the same value and a gift of free lodging, and, in 1627, by the appointment to the post of Gentleman Usher. There is no doubt but that the king was attached to his young court painter in a certain undemonstrative fashion. Pacheco tells us that Philip used to visit the artist's studio constantly, reaching it by way of the secret pa.s.sages of which the palace was full.

The year 1628 marks an event of the first importance in the life of Velazquez, for Peter Paul Rubens came on a diplomatic mission to Madrid, charged by his government to pave the way to the conclusion of peace between England and Spain. Rubens was then about fifty years old. He stayed nine months in the Spanish capital, and, despite his diplomatic duties and the gout, found time to paint an extraordinary number of pictures, including five of Philip. He also copied the king's t.i.tians. Velazquez was entrusted by Philip with the work of entertaining Rubens, and showing him the art treasures of Spain, and the friendship that grew up rapidly between the two artists was creditable to both, because Rubens, then at the zenith of his fame, recognised the amazing gifts of the young Spaniard, and Velazquez never allowed the brilliancy of the amba.s.sador-artist to tempt him from the paths that he had chosen to follow. There are some who think that Rubens exerted a great influence upon his young friend's art, but we cannot pretend to trace it. Rubens may have widened his mind; he could not influence his hand or eye.

Shortly after Rubens left Madrid, Velazquez completed his picture "Los Borrachos," now in the Prado, and one of the acknowledged masterpieces of his first style, though the tone is dark, and some of the figures do not blend with their surroundings. In the late summer of the same year Velazquez left Spain for Italy, in the company of Don Ambrosio Spinola, who was going to take command of the Spanish forces. Soldier and artist parted at Milan, and the latter went to Venice, where he stayed with the Spanish amba.s.sador and copied some of Tintoretto's pictures.

Thence he went by way of Ferrara to Rome, the honoured guest of a relation of the Count of Olivarez, and he busied himself copying old pictures and painting new ones. Like many of the artists who go for the first time to Italy, he was influenced in some degree by Guido, who was then living. He painted his own portrait, which is to be seen in the Capitoline Museum, and went from Rome to Naples, returning to Madrid in the early part of 1651.

PLATE IV.--THE INFANTE DON BALTHASAR CARLOS

This is one of the Prado pictures of King Philip's eldest son by his first wife, the unfortunate little prince who died while he was yet a boy. When this picture was painted Don Balthasar Carlos was six years old.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Plate IV.]

It might be mentioned in this place that the painter's eldest daughter was growing up, and that he married her three years later to one of his pupils, the artist J. B. del Mazo. This clever artist, who was treated by his master Velazquez as Velazquez had been treated by his master Pacheco, is held by critics to be responsible for many pictures generally ascribed to his father-in-law. There is a picture in the Wallace Collection known as the "Lady with the Fan," which is thought by no less a critic than Senor Beruete to represent the young Francesca Velazquez, who became the Senora del Mazo when she was only fifteen years old.

Shortly after his return to Madrid, Velazquez came under the influence of El Greco, who had died in 1614, and left some wonderful pictures that may be seen to-day in Toledo. This fact is important, not that the influence resulted in imitation, but because it was distinctly inspiring, and Greco is a painter who is coming slowly before the public. It cannot be doubted that his influence on artists through Velazquez has been very deep and abiding, particularly in portraiture.

In the years following the return from Italy, Velazquez painted some of the pictures of the little prince Don Balthasar Carlos, the king's son, who was born in 1629, and died in 1646, the year of his betrothal to Mariana of Austria. There are many pictures of this interesting lad who, had he lived, might have done so much to save his country. The earliest was painted as soon as Velazquez returned from Italy, and is at present in Boston. The next in date would seem to be the one in the Wallace Collection, and following this comes the well-known picture of Don Balthasar in hunting dress, now in the Prado, the one with the small greyhound seen on the right, just coming into the canvas. Then we have the famous picture of the young prince on his spirited Andalusian pony, which is perhaps the most popular of all; and succeeding that in the order of the painting comes the portrait that, in the writer's opinion, is the best of the series. It hangs in the Imperial Museum in Vienna, and was painted when the prince was about eleven years old. Doubtless there are other portraits of the ill-fated boy, whose features seem to suggest that he had inherited from his mother some of the qualities that his father lacked, and that had he been spared to succeed his father in 1665, he would have handled affairs with vigour and intelligence.