VELASQUEZ
During the years in which Van Dyck was painting his beautiful portraits
of the Royal Family of England, another painter, Velasquez, was
immortalizing another Royal Family in the far-away country of Spain.
Cut off by the great mountains of the Pyrenees from the rest of Europe,
Spain did not rank among the foremost powers until after the discovery
of America had brought wealth to her from the gold mines of Mexico
and Peru. In the sixteenth century the King of Spain's dominions,
actual or virtual, covered a great part of Western Europe, excepting
England and France. Germany, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, owned
the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. His son was Philip
II. of Spain, the husband of our Queen Mary of England, and his
great-grandson was King Philip IV., the patron of Velasquez, as Charles
I. was of Van Dyck.
It is the little son of Philip IV., Don Balthazar Carlos, whose portrait
is before us--as manly and sturdy looking a little fellow as ever
bestrode a pony. He was but six years old when Velasquez painted the
picture here reproduced. Certainly he was not fettered and cramped
and prevented from taking exercise like his little sisters. The
princesses of Spain were dressed in wide skirts, spread out over hoops
and hiding their feet, from the time they could walk. The tops of the
dresses were as stiff as corselets, and one wonders how the little
girls were able to move at all. As they grew older the hoops became
wider and wider, until in one picture of a grown-up princess, the skirts
are broader than the whole height of her body. Stringent Court
etiquette forbade a princess to let her feet be seen, but so odd may
such conventions be, that it was nevertheless thought correct for the
Queen to ride on horseback astride.
It is from the canvases of Velasquez that we know the Spanish Royal
Family and the aspect of the Court of Philip IV. as though we had lived
there ourselves. The painter was born in the south of Spain in the
same year as Van Dyck, and seven years earlier than Rembrandt. To paint
the portrait of his sovereign was the ambition of the young artist.
When his years were but twenty-four the opportunity arrived, and Philip
was so pleased with the picture that he took the young man into his
household, and said that no one else should ever be allowed to paint
his portrait. Velasquez welcomed with gratified joy the prospect of
that life-long proximity, although neither his earnings nor his
station at all matched the service he rendered to his sovereign. As
the years went on he was paid a little better, but his days and hours
were more and more taken up with duties at Court, and his salary was
always in arrears. He could not even reserve his own private time for
his art, but as he waxed higher in the estimation of the King, the
supervision of Court ceremonies, entrusted to him as an honour,
deprived him of leisure, and at last brought his life prematurely to
a close.
From the time when Velasquez entered the service of the King, he painted
exclusively for the Court. We have eight portraits by him of Philip
IV., and five of the little Don Carlos, besides many others of the
queens and princesses. We can follow the growth of his art in the
portraits of Philip IV., as we can follow that of Rembrandt in portraits
of himself. But while Rembrandt might make of the same person, himself,
or another model, a dozen different people, so that it mattered little
who the model was, Velasquez was concerned with a different problem.
In the seventeenth century almost any good painter could draw his
models correctly, but Velasquez reproduced the living aspect of a man
as no one else had done. We have already spoken of the feeling of
atmosphere that Cuyp and Peter de Hoogh were able to bring into their
pictures. Velasquez, knowing little or nothing of the contemporary
Dutchmen, worked at the same art problems all his life, and at last
mastered the atmosphere problem completely, whether it was the air
of a closed room in the dark palace of Philip, or the air of the open
country, as in our picture. In this there is no bright light except
upon the face of the little prince. It is dark and gloomy weather,
but if on such a day you were to see the canvas in the open air it
would almost seem part of the country itself, as Velasquez's picture
of a room seems part of the gallery in which it hangs.
It was only by degrees that he attained this quality in his work. He
had had the ordinary teaching of a painter in Spain, but the level
of art there at the time was not so high as in Holland or Italy. Like
Rembrandt he was to a great extent his own master. In his early years
he painted pictures of middle-class life, in which each figure is
truthfully depicted, as were the early heads in Rembrandt's 'Anatomy.'
Like Rembrandt in his youth, he looked at each head separately and
painted it as faithfully as he could. The higher art of composing into
the unity of a group all its parts, and keeping their perfections within
such limits as best co-operate in the transcendent perfection of the
whole--this was the labour and the crown of both their lives.
Velasquez's best and greatest groups are such a realized vision of
life that they have remained the despair of artists to this day.
Velasquez came to Court in the year in which Charles I., as Prince
of Wales, went to Madrid to woo the sister of Philip IV. He painted
her portrait twice, and made an unfinished sketch of Charles, which
has unfortunately been lost. Five years afterwards Rubens was a visitor
at the Spanish Court on a diplomatic errand. The painters took a fancy
to one another, and corresponded for the remainder of their lives.
They must have talked long about their art, and the elder painter,
Rubens, is thought to have promoted in Velasquez a desire to see the
great treasures of Italy. At all events we find that in the next year
he has obtained permission and money from Philip to undertake the
journey, which kept him away from Spain for two years.
There is an amusing page, in doggerel verse, which I remember to have
read some years ago. I trust the translator will pardon the liberty
I am taking in quoting it. It reports a perhaps imaginary conversation
between Velasquez and an Italian painter in Rome. 'The Master' in this
rhyme is Velasquez.
The Master stiffly bowed his figure tall
And said, 'For Raphael, to speak the truth,
--I always was plain-spoken from my youth,--
I cannot say I like his works at all.'
'Well,' said the other, 'if you can run down
So great a man, I really cannot see
What you can find to like in Italy;
To him we all agree to give the crown.'
Velasquez answered thus: 'I saw in Venice
The true test of the good and beautiful;
First, in my judgment, ever stands that school,
And Titian first of all Italian men is.'
Velasquez in Rome was already a ripening artist, whose vision of the
world was quite uncoloured and unshaped by the medieval tradition.
Raphael's pictures with their superhumanly lovely saints, their
unworldly feeling, and their supernaturally clear light, doubtless
imparted pleasure, but not a sympathetic inspiration. Tintoret's
immense creative power and the colours of Titian's painting which
inspired Tintoret's ambition, as we remember--these were the effective
influences Velasquez experienced in Italy. His purchases and his own
later canvases afford that inference. On his return from Italy he
painted a ceremonial picture as wall decoration for one of the palaces
of Philip, and in it we can trace the influence of the great ceremonial
paintings of the Venetians. The picture commemorates the surrender
of Breda in North Brabant, when the famous General Spinola received
its keys for Philip IV. It is far more than a series of separate figures.
Two armies, officers and men, are grouped in one transaction, in one
near and far landscape. It is a picture in which the foreground and
the distances, with the lances of the soldiers and the smoke of battle,
are as indispensable to the whole as are the central figures of the
Dutchman in front handing the city keys to the courtly Spanish general.
Don Balthazar Carlos was born while Velasquez was in Italy. On his
return he painted his first portrait of him at the age of two. The
little prince is dressed in a richly-brocaded frock with a sash tied
round his shoulder. His hair has only just begun to grow, but he has
the same look of determination upon his face that we see four years
later in the equestrian portrait. A dwarf about his own height stands
a step lower than he does, so as again to give him prominence. Another
picture of Don Balthazar a little older is in the Wallace Collection
in London.
Velasquez's power with his brush lay in depicting vividly a scene that
he saw; thus in portraiture he was at his best. He knew how to pose
his figures to perfection, so as to make the expression of their
character a true pictorial subject. In our picture it is on high ground
that the hoofs of the pony of Don Balthazar Carlos tread. So to raise
the little Prince above the eye of the spectator was a good stroke,
suggesting an importance in the gallant young rider. The boy's erect
figure, too, firmly holding his baton as a king might hold a sceptre,
and the well-stirruped foot, are all perfect posing. Velasquez does
not give him distinction in the manner of Van Dyck, by delicate drawing
and gentle grace, but in a sturdier fashion, with speed and pose and
a fluttering sash in the wind. All the portraits of this lad are full
of charm. He was heir to the throne, but died in boyhood.
[Illustration: DON BALTHAZAR CARLOS
From the picture by Velasquez, in the Prado Museum, Madrid]
Velasquez paid another visit to Italy, twenty years after his first,
for the purpose of buying more pictures to adorn Philip's palaces.
Again we find him in Venice, where he bought two Tintorets and a
Veronese, and again he made a long stay in Rome, this time to paint
the portrait of the Pope. When he returned to Spain in 1651 he had
still nine years of work before him. There were portraits of Philip's
new Queen to be painted--a young girl in a most uncomfortable
dress--and portraits of her child, the Infanta Marguerita. Bewitching
are the pictures of this little princess at the ages of three, of four,
and of seven, with her fair hair tied in a bow at the side of her head,
and voluminous skirts of pink and silver. But sweetest of all is the
picture called 'The Maids of Honour' ('Les Meninas'), in which the
princess, aged about six, is being posed for her portrait. She is
petulant and tired, and two of her handmaidens are cajoling her to
stand still. Her two dwarfs and a big dog have been brought to amuse
her, and the King and Queen, reflected in a mirror at the end of the
room, stand watching the scene. Velasquez himself, with his easel and
brushes, is at the side, painting. The picture perpetuates for
centuries a moment of palace life. In that transitory instant,
Velasquez took his vivid impression of the scene, and has translated
his impression into paint. Everything is simple and natural as can
be. The ordinary light of day falls upon the princess, but does not
penetrate to the ceiling of the lofty room, which is still in shadow.
All seem to have come together haphazard without being fitted into
the canvas. There is little detail, and the whole effect seems produced
by the simplest means; yet in reality the skill involved is so great
that artists to-day spend weeks copying the picture, in the endeavour
to learn something of the secret of Velasquez.
The best judges are among those who rank him highest, so that he is
called pre-eminently 'the painter's painter.' It is impossible for
any one but a painter to understand how he used paint. From near at
hand it looks a smudge, but at the proper distance every stroke takes
its right place. Such freedom was the result of years of careful
painting of detail, and is not to be attained by any royal road.
Velasquez seldom seems to have made preliminary drawings, but of that
we cannot be sure. Certainly he had learned to conceive his vision
as a whole, and we may fancy at least that he drew it so upon the
canvas--altering the lines as he went--working at all the parts of
the picture at once, keeping the due relation of part to part; not
as if he finished one bit at a time, or thought of one part of a figure
as distinct from the rest. To have drawn separate studies for legs
and arms would have been foreign to his method of working.
The pictures painted in this his latest style are few, for the court
duties heaped upon him left too little time. Maria Theresa, the sister
of Don Balthazar Carlos, was engaged to be married to Louis XIV., King
of France. The marriage took place on the border of France and Spain,
and Velasquez was in charge of all the ceremonies. The Princess
travelled with a cavalcade eighteen miles long, and we can imagine
what work all the arrangements involved. The marriage over, the ever
loyal Velasquez returned to Madrid, but he returned only to die.