Chapter 12

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.

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.