yearning in him to paint it. The lock in the main stream, with its tide
of life passing through, busier then than in these days of railways; the
bridge above, with the picturesque cottages still standing, all were
lingered over, studied, and painted with an affection inspired by the
recollection of those golden hours of his boyhood. Here, doubtless, was
the scene of those stolen interviews with his future wife, following
the ecclesiastical ban placed on his suit by the lady's grandfather, Dr.
Rhudde, the Rector, whose belief in the preordination of marriage was
tempered in this case by a wise discretion on the subject of
settlements. To the young painter's inability to satisfy this scruple
may be attributed the Doctor's discouragement of any practical
application of the theory. The marriage duly took place despite the old
gentleman, who, although not apparently reconciled during the remainder
of his life, pleasantly surprised the young couple by leaving his
granddaughter four thousand pounds when he died.
The mill-tail is used as a thoroughfare, up which the hay is carted,
from the meadows on the opposite bank of the river, a shallow and stony
bedded back-water meeting it at its junction with the main stream. Down
this back-water in July the heavy cart-horses drag the sweet-scented
haywains knee deep and axle deep in water, leaving feathery wisps of hay
hanging from the willows, and clinging to the tall rushes upon either
hand, the waggoner bravely astride the leader, while haymakers and
children are seated on top of the load, not a little nervous in
mid-stream, and clinging tightly when the horses are struggling up the
deep ascent into the stack-yard.
A contrast, indeed, is the bustle of the hay-making with the splash of
the teams and the merry voices of the children to the solitude which
reigns supreme in this silent, currentless backwater during the rest of
the year. Winding between the long flat meadows away from the traffic of
the river it becomes in early summer a veritable museum of aquatic
plants: lilies choke its passage, and the ancient gates, giving access
to the adjoining fields, lie lost in creamy meadow-sweet, their sodden
and decaying posts wreathed in sweet forget-me-nots, while sword-like
rushes rear their points till they part the grey-green willow leaves
above. The silence would become oppressive were it not for an indistinct
murmur from the working world, which forms a fitful background to the
prevailing stillness; the distant roar of a train as it rushes on its
journey to the palpitating heart of London, the faint sound of a mowing
machine in the meadows, or the crack of a whip up the tow-path as a
barge moves up to the primitive lock, add a touch of human interest
without disturbing the sense of restfulness from the eager hurry of
Nineteenth Century existence....
Constable's country may be said to extend along the Stour valley,
anywhere within walking distance of his home, Neyland, Stoke, Langham,
Stratford, and in the opposite direction, Harwich, all having furnished
material for his fruitful pencil. But, despite much admirable work done
in each of these places, it was to the few acres of river and meadow
round the old mill at Flatford that he owed his first awakening to the
wonders of nature around him. To these, his first and truest masters,
his memory was ever turning for inspiration; and during the life-long
battle he waged with all that was untrue, he was certain of finding
there encouragement to victory and solace in disappointment.
_Magazine of Art_ (1891).
THE SURRENDER OF BREDA
(_VELASQUEZ_)
THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
_The Surrender of Breda_, better known under the name of _Las Lanzas_,
mingles in the most exact proportion realism and grandeur. Truth pushed
to the point of portraiture does not diminish in the slightest degree
the dignity of the historical style.
A vast and spacious sky full of light and vapour, richly laid in with
pure ultramarine, mingles its azure with the blue distances of an
immense landscape where sheets of water gleam with silver. Here and
there incendiary smoke ascends from the ground in fantastic wreaths and
joins the clouds of the sky. In the foreground on each side, a numerous
group is massed: here the Flemish troops, there the Spanish troops,
leaving for the interview between the vanquished and victorious generals
an open space which Velasquez has made a luminous opening with a glimpse
of the distance where the glitter of the regiments and standards is
indicated by a few masterly touches.
The Marquis of Spinola, bareheaded with hat and staff of command in
hand, in his black armour damascened with gold, welcomes with a
chivalrous courtesy that is affable and almost affectionate, as is
customary between enemies who are generous and worthy of mutual esteem,
the Governor of Breda, who is bowing and offering him the keys of the
city in an attitude of noble humiliation.
Flags quartered with white and blue, their folds agitated by the wind,
break in the happiest manner the straight lines of the lances held
upright by the Spaniards. The horse of the Marquis, represented almost
foreshortened from the rear and with its head turned, is a skilful
invention to tone down military symmetry, so unfavourable to painting.
It would not be easy to convey in words the chivalric pride and the
Spanish grandeur which distinguish the heads of the officers forming the
General's staff. They express the calm joy of triumph, tranquil pride of
race, and familiarity with great events. These personages would have no
need to bring proofs for their admittance into the orders of Santiago
and Calatrava. Their bearing would admit them, so unmistakably are they
hidalgos. Their long hair, their turned-up moustaches, their pointed
beards, their steel gorgets, their corselets or their buff doublets
render them in advance ancestral portraits to hang up, with their arms
blazoned on the corner of the canvas, in the galleries of old castles.
No one has known so well as Velasquez how to paint the gentleman with
such superb familiarity, and, so to speak, as equal to equal. He is by
no means a poor, embarrassed artist who only sees his models while they
are posing and has never lived with them. He follows them in the privacy
of the royal apartments, on great hunting-parties, and in ceremonies of
pomp. He knows their bearing, their gestures, their attitudes, and their
physiognomy; he himself is one of the King's favourites (_privados del
rey_). Like themselves, and even more than they, he has _les grandes
et les petites entrées_.[20] The nobility of Spain having Velasquez for
a portrait-painter could not say, like the lion of the fable: "Ah! if
the lions only knew how to paint."
[Illustration: THE SURRENDER OF BREDA.
_Velasquez_.]
Velasquez takes his place naturally between Titian and Van Dyck as a
painter of portraits. His colour is solidly and profoundly harmonious,
without any false luxury and with no need of glitter. His magnificence
is that of ancient hereditary fortunes. It has tranquillity, equality,
and intimacy. We find no violent reds, greens, nor blues, no upstart
glitter, no brilliant gew-gaws. All is restrained and subdued, but with
a warm tone like that of old gold, or with a grey tone like the dead
sheen of family silver. Gaudy and loud things will do for upstarts, but
Don Diego Velasquez de Silva is too true a gentleman to make himself an
object of remark in that manner, and, let us say, too good a painter
also. Although a realist, he brings to his art a lofty grandeur, a
disdain of useless detail, and an intentional sacrifice that plainly
reveal the sovereign master. These sacrifices were not always those that
another painter would have made. Velasquez chose to put in evidence
what, it sometimes seems, should have been left in shadow. He
extinguishes and he illuminates with apparent caprice, but the effect
always justifies him.
The correctness of his eye was such that while he only pretended to be
copying, he brought the soul to the surface and painted the inner and
the outer man at the same time. His portraits relate the secret
_Mémoires_ of the Spanish court better than all the chroniclers. Let him
represent them in gala dress, riding their genets, in hunting-costume,
an arquebuse in their hand, a greyhound at their feet, and we recognize
in these wan figures of kings, queens, and infantas, with pale faces,
red lips, and massive chins the degeneracy of Charles V. and the falling
away of exhausted dynasties. Although a court-painter, he has not
flattered his royal models. However, despite the brainlessness of the
type, the quality of these high personages would never be doubted. It is
not that he did not know how to paint genius; the portrait of the
Count-Duke of Olivares, so noble, so imperious, and so full of
authority, unanswerably proves that, unable to lend any fire to these
sad lords, he gives them a cold majesty, a wearied dignity, a gesture
and pose of etiquette, and then envelops all with his magnificent
colour; that was full payment for the protection of his crowned friend.
M. Paul de Saint-Victor has somewhere called Victor Hugo "The Spanish
Grandee of poetry;" may we not be permitted to call Velasquez "The
Spanish Grandee of painting"? No qualification would suit him better.
As we have said, Velasquez was Court Chamberlain, and it was he who was
charged with the preparation of the lodgings of the King in the trip
that Philip IV. made to Irun to deliver the Infanta Doña Maria-Teresa to
the King of France. It was he who had decorated and ornamented the
pavilion where the interview of the two kings took place in the Île des
Faisans. Velasquez was distinguished among the crowd of courtiers by his
personal dignity, the elegance, the richness, and the good taste of his
costumes on which he arranged with art the diamonds and jewels,--gifts
of the sovereigns; but on his return to Madrid, he fell ill with
fatigue and died on the 7th of August, 1660. His widow, Doña Juana
Pacheco, only survived him seven days and was interred near him in the
parish of San Juan. The funeral of Velasquez was splendid; great
personages, knights of the military orders, the King's household, and
the artists were present sad and pensive, as if they felt that with
Velasquez they were interring Spanish art.
_Guide de l'Amateur au Musée du Louvre_ (Paris, 1882).
FOOTNOTES:
[20] Private audiences of the King.
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
(_MURILLO_)
AIMÉ GIRON
After her 3,700 battles with the Moors and the conquest of Granada,
Spain had a splendid outburst of literary and artistic glory. In
painting, the four schools of Valencia, Toledo, Madrid, and Seville
suddenly shone forth with that conception of the real and that care for
sharp relief which they owed to the brilliancy of their sunshine, while
amid the fogs of the North the outline is more wavering and the vision
less clear. Under the influence of this original realism, their works
instinctively reproduced that two-fold character which the land of
Spain, smiling in her valleys and savage in her mountains, shows in
sharp contrast. But the Spaniards are, in truth, much more realistic in
their execution than in their inspiration.
The school of Seville, founded by Luis de Vargas, counted among its
illustrious masters the greatest painter of that sunlit and passionate
Andalusia, Murillo (Bartolomé-Estéban), 1617-1682, Spain's most popular
painter, "the painter of the Conceptions," as she called him.
[Illustration: THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.
_Murillo_.]
His uncle, Juan del Castillo, a mediocre artist but a good teacher,
initiated him into his dry, stiff, and hard manner,--that of the old
Florentine school. In his studio young Estéban Murillo had young Pedro
de Moya as a fellow-student. One day the former took a fancy to go to
Cadiz, where, miserable enough, he painted on pieces of serge some
Madonnas for traffic in the West Indies, while the latter went to London
to work in Van Dyck's studio. On his return Pedro de Moya brought
several studies of the Flemish master, and Murillo, suddenly
revolutionized and suddenly illuminated, no longer dreamed of anything
but of going to Flanders or Italy, passing--happily--through Madrid. In
Madrid, the Velasquez of the Court of Charles II. stopped him on the
way, gave him admission to the royal collections, where he copied
Titian, Veronese, and Rubens, and then opened his purse to him, and,
lastly, revealed the secrets of his mighty art.
Thus taught and thus inspired, Murillo returned to Seville, where he
settled once for all, immuring himself in his studio, where--modest,
timid, and gentle--he lived with that single love for his art which soon
enriched him, two years later adding to it the adoration of his wife, a
noble lady of Pilas. It was from this studio that almost all of his
laborious, numerous, and superb works issued, sometimes scarcely signed.
From the very beginning, Murillo possessed all the qualities of a great
master, and henceforth we have only to separate his own personality and
originality.
Murillo had three periods, as he also had three styles according to the
nature of the subjects he had to treat: the first period, under the
influence of the Florentine formulas of Juan del Castillo, was somewhat
that of happy and masterly imitations; the second, under the memories of
Van Dyck, brought back by Pedro de Moya and of the copies painted at
Madrid, belongs to the Flemish school. But, at thirty-five, in full
possession of his genius, he reveals _himself_, with his superb
colouring, his consummate ease, his great science, his rich and
inexhaustible imagination, his exquisite and tender sentiment, and his
harmony, often produced with feminine delicacy and childish grace, with
his vigour, his trivialities, and his mysticism.
The genius of Murillo, in fact, obeyed a double current, which carried
him forward, on the one hand towards the sky, and on the other towards
the earth, towards the Catholic ideal or towards vulgar realities,
gentle Madonnas alternately with knavish beggars. Very sincerely and
observantly religious, with the contemplative soul of the land of great
men and great mysteries, Saint John of the Cross and Saint Theresa, this
chaste artist, who never painted a nude woman, has the exalted sentiment
of faith of the Spanish artists, a sentiment which is somewhat ennobled
by their realism of nature.
"Why don't you finish that Christ?" asked one of his friends.
"I am waiting until he comes to speak to me," replied Murillo.
With these works he enriched the chapter-house of the Seville Cathedral,
the Hospital de la Caridad, that of the Hospital de los Venerables, the
convents of the Capuchins, the Augustines, etc.
I have said that Murillo had three styles, almost three pencils, not
like the pencils of gold, of silver, and of iron that the Venetians
attributed to the unequal genius of Tintoret, but in sympathy with the
subjects he had to treat. The Spaniards have distinguished and
qualified these styles as follows: _Frio, calido y vaporoso_, cold,
warm, and vaporous.
In the cold style he painted broadly, boldly, and frankly his beggars
and his _muchachos_, so true to life and in strong relief, with a
certain brutality almost approaching triviality. A very well-known work
of this kind is the _Pouilleux_ in the Museum of the Louvre, and a
masterpiece in the Pinacothek of Munich, the Grandmother and Infant. He
sought these types in some old Moorish dwelling, on the deck of a ship
from Tunis or Tripoli anchored in a Spanish harbour, or in among a band
of wandering _Gitanos_ on the banks of the Guadalquivir.
In the vaporous manner, which he used in rendering the ecstasies of the
saints, he painted (under indescribable transparencies of light and
atmospheric shade which is really only extinguished light), _Saint
Francis in Ecstasy_, _The Angel Kitchen_ (Miracle of San Diego) running
through several scales of tones in a marvellous chord and softening all
the outlines "dulcemente perdidos," as Céan Bermudez says.
In his warm style, come his _Annunciations_, _Conceptions_, and all
those gentle and graceful Madonnas, sweet and poetic young mothers
rather than divine Virgins "whom Jews might kiss and Infidels adore," as
Pope says, and which remind us of Correggio's effeminacy, unknown to
Murillo, and in which he plays with ease with harmonies, contrasts, and
reflections of colour.
_The Immaculate Conception_, in the National Museum of the Louvre, is of
this style. Certainly it is not more beautiful than the _Conception_ in
Madrid, of such extraordinary brilliance, and of such a virginal
expression of innocence, piety, and melancholy; and above all not more
beautiful than that of Seville--_The Great Conception_, or the _Pearl of
Conceptions_, making the Virgin Mother's face into a beautiful and
intense face of an archangel. That had its day of resounding triumph.
Every one knows that Marshal Soult accepted this work in Spain for the
pardon of two monks condemned to be hanged as spies. On the 29th of May,
1852, this canvas was sold at auction. Around it the greatest nations
were represented with their rival gold, and loud applause accompanied
each royal bid. When, for the sum of 615,300 francs, it was knocked
down--"To France, gentlemen!" cried the Count de Nieuwerkerke--then
broke forth the delirium of a battle won.
In a diaphanous atmosphere gilded with an invisible clearness as of
Paradise, the winged heads and bodies of little angels are moving: the
former gracefully grouped, the latter boldly and skilfully disposed. The
celestial infants have followed all the way to the earth the rays of
celestial light in its elusive gradations of colour under its
imperceptible glazing. In the centre, in the act of ascent, the Virgin
rises in ecstasy. One corner of a cloud, the crescent moon, and a
masterly group of little angels, naked and enraptured, bear the
Immaculate aloft. Gracefully and statuesquely posed, and broadly draped
in a white robe with sober folds enriched by an ample scarf of light
blue, she modestly hides her feet under the drapery and chastely crosses
her hands over the breast in which she feels the conception of the Son
of God operating. Her head under its dishevelled waves of black hair, a
little turned back and bending slightly to one side, is raised to heaven
with uplifted eyes and open mouth, as if to receive in every sense the
flow of the spirit. The face, in the exquisite sweetness of a surrender
to piety, reflects the bliss of Faith, of mystical voluptuousness, and
divine ecstasy. The expression is religious, but the Virgin is human,
and full of life in the firmness of her lines and the warmth of her
flesh-tints. Beneath the suppleness of the drawing and the soft touches
we recognize in Mary the Immaculate, the woman and even the Andalusian.
The whole work is a most harmonious and well-balanced composition, of
the greatest opulence of colour, solidly laid in, and here and there
lightly glazed over in the Venetian manner; a superb work this, in which
Murillo has found the right point where his idealism and his materialism
meet and mingle.
If I remember rightly, we know one hundred and thirty canvases of
Murillo, to any one of which our admiration hesitates to award the
pre-eminence,--and if the crown of laurels which a Pope laid upon the
funeral couch of Raphael is the consecration of the sovereignty of the
painter of Urbino for History, the universally popular name of Murillo
has also sanctified the incontestable genius of the painter of Seville.
Jouin, _Chefs-d'oeuvre: Peinture, Sculpture Architecture_
(Paris, 1895-97).
ST. FRANCIS BEFORE THE SOLDAN
(_GIOTTO_)
JOHN RUSKIN
It is a characteristic--(as far as I know, quite a universal one)--of
the great masters, that they never expect you to look at them;--seem
always rather surprised if you want to; and not overpleased. Tell them
you are going to hang their picture at the upper end of the table at the
next great City dinner, and that Mr. So-and-So will make a speech about
it;--you produce no impression upon them whatever, or an unfavourable
one. The chances are ten to one they send you the most rubbishy thing
they can find in their lumber-room. But send for one of them in a hurry,
and tell him the rats have gnawed a nasty hole behind the parlour door,
and you want it plastered and painted over;--and he does you a
masterpiece which the world will peep behind your door to look at for
ever.
I have no time to tell you why this is so; nor do I know why,
altogether, but so it is.
Giotto, then, is sent for, to paint this high chapel: I am not sure if
he chose his own subjects from the life of St. Francis: I think so,--but
of course can't reason on the guess securely. At all events, he would
have much of his own way in the matter.
[Illustration: ST. FRANCIS BEFORE THE SOLDAN.
_Giotto._]
Now you must observe that painting a Gothic chapel rightly is just the
same thing as painting a Greek vase rightly. The chapel is merely the
vase turned upside-down, and outside-in. The principles of decoration
are exactly the same. Your decoration is to be proportioned to the size
of your vase; to be together delightful when you look at the cup, or
chapel, as a whole; to be various and entertaining when you turn the cup
round; (you turn _yourself_ round in the chapel;) and to bend its heads
and necks of figures about, as best it can, over the hollows, and ins
and outs, so that anyhow, whether too long or too short--possible or
impossible--they may be living, and full of grace. You will also please
take it on my word to-day--in another morning walk you shall have proof
of it--that Giotto was a pure Etruscan-Greek of the Thirteenth Century:
converted indeed to worship St. Francis instead of Heracles; but as far
as vase-painting goes, precisely the Etruscan he was before. This is
nothing else than a large, beautiful, coloured Etruscan vase you have
got, inverted over your heads like a diving-bell. The roof has the
symbols of the three virtues of labour--Poverty, Chastity, Obedience.
A. Highest on the left side, looking to the window. The life of St.
Francis begins in his renunciation of the world.
B. Highest on the right side. His new life is approved and ordained by
the authority of the church.
C. Central on the left side. He preaches to his own disciples.
D. Central on the right side. He preaches to the heathen.
E. Lowest on the left side. His burial.
F. Lowest on the right side. His power after death.
Besides these six subjects, there are, on the sides of the window, the
four great Franciscan saints, St. Louis of France, St. Louis of
Toulouse, St. Clare, and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. The Soldan, with an
ordinary opera-glass, you may see clearly enough; and I think it will be
first well to notice some technical points in it.
If the little virgin on the stairs of the temple reminded you of one
composition of Titian's, this Soldan should, I think, remind you of all
that is greatest in Titian; so forcibly, indeed, that for my own part,
if I had been told that a careful early fresco by Titian had been
recovered in Santa Croce, I could have believed both report and my own
eyes, more quickly than I have been able to admit that this is indeed by
Giotto. It is so great that--had its principles been understood--there
was in reality nothing more to be taught of art in Italy; nothing to be
invented afterwards except Dutch effects of light.
That there is "no effect of light" here arrived at, I beg you at once to
observe as a most important lesson. The subject is St. Francis
challenging the Soldan's Magi,--fire-worshippers--to pass with him
through the fire, which is blazing red at his feet. It is so hot that
the two Magi on the other side of the throne shield their faces. But it
is represented simply as a red mass of writhing forms of flame; and
casts no firelight whatever. There is no ruling colour on anybody's
nose; there are no black shadows under anybody's chin; there are no
Rembrandtesque gradations of gloom, or glitterings of sword-hilt and
armour.
Is this ignorance, think you, in Giotto, and pure artlessness? He was
now a man in middle life, having passed all his days in painting, and
professedly, and almost contentiously, painting things as he saw them.
Do you suppose he never saw fire cast firelight?--and he the friend of
Dante! who of all poets is the most subtle in his sense of every kind of
effect of light--though he has been thought by the public to know that
of fire only. Again and again, his ghosts wonder that there is no shadow
cast by Dante's body; and is the poet's friend _because_ a painter,
likely, therefore, not to have known that mortal substance casts shadow,
and terrestrial flame, light? Nay, the passage in the _Purgatorio_ where
the shadows from the morning sunshine make the flames redder, reaches
the accuracy of Newtonian science, and does Giotto, think you, all the
while, see nothing of the sort?