_Velazquez_ (Spanish: 1599-1660). _See 197._
Few kings have left so many enduring monuments of themselves as
Philip IV., whose face figures twice on these walls and meets one
in nearly every European gallery. But nowhere, perhaps, has it been
more supremely rendered than on this canvas, where the king seems to
live and move before us. The picture is "perhaps the finest example
of oil-painting accessible to the British student. Though one of the
later works of the master, it is constructed out of a carefully wrought
and smooth impasto, without any 'bravura' strokes. The lights are
nowhere loaded. The hair is painted, not modelled; the jewels on the
dress are easily touched in without relief-effect or juggling. The
wonder of the thing is the infinite variety over a surface so simply
treated. The face is in such broad, even light that one has to adopt
some device which brings it freshly into the field of vision--as by
turning the head down or looking at it through the hand--in order
to see how firm is the modelling. The flesh-tints are simple enough.
Yet take almost any square inch of surface on the face--say the upper
lip with its moustache--and note the effect of each one of the free
brush-strokes which draw the pale, umber hair over the warm rubbing
on the flesh; or in the cold, lack-lustre, blue eye, measure the
apparent ease of the touches against their firm, incisive clearness.
Everything is there--form, expression--in a word, the life; but it has
all grown into perfection on the canvas so quietly, so smoothly, as
if Velazquez had indeed painted with the will only and not with the
hand" (Baldwin Brown: _The Fine Arts_, p. 319). "Velazquez fuses his
colours in a way that baffles painters. They melt into each other by
imperceptible gradations, as he deals with plane after plane in his
subtly-modelled faces. Observe the action of light on the pallid face
of the worn-out king, giving to the skin the breath of life in its
delicate transparency" (_Quarterly Review_, April 1899).
The face is one which, once seen, is not soon forgotten. Velazquez,
as we have said, caught its expression at once, and by comparing the
face in its youth (1129) with its middle age here, one can almost
trace the king's career. In youth we see him cold and phlegmatic,
but slender in figure graceful and dignified in bearing, and with a
fine open forehead. But the young king was bent on ease and pleasure,
and his minister Olivares did nothing to persuade him into more
active kingship. The less pleasing traits in his character have, in
consequence, come to be deeper impressed at the time of this later
portrait. He was devoted to sport, and the cruelty of the Spaniard
is conspicuous in the lip--more underhung now than before. In the
growth of the double chin and yet greater impassiveness of expression,
one may see the traces of that "talent for dead silence and marble
immobility" which, says the historian, "he so highly improved that
he could sit out a comedy without stirring hand or foot, and conduct
an audience without movement of a muscle, except those in his lips
and tongue." It is not the face of a great ruler; but it is one which
rightly lives on a painter's canvas, for no king was ever at once so
liberal and so enlightened a patron of the arts as he. Himself too he
was something of an artist; and the best-known piece of his painting
tells a pretty story, which it is pleasant to remember in front of
Velazquez's portraits of him. Velazquez painted once his own portrait
in the background of the king's family (the "Maids of Honour"--Las
Meninas--now at Madrid). "Is there anything wrong with it?" Velazquez
asked. "Yes," said the king, taking the palette in his hand, "just
this"--and he sketched in on the painter's portrait the coveted red
cross of the order of Santiago. "In all his portraits Philip wears the
_golilla_, a stiff linen collar projecting at right angles from the
neck. It was invented by the king, who was very proud of it. In regard
to the wonderful structure of Philip's moustaches, it is said that, to
preserve their form, they were encased during the night in perfumed
leather covers called _bigoteras_" (J. F. White, in _Encyclopædia
Britannica_).