A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

1676. CHRIST DISPUTING WITH THE DOCTORS.

Francesco de Herrera, the elder (Spanish: 1576-1656).

Francesco de Herrera, the elder—so called to distinguish him from a son of the same name who was also a painter—was the first to throw off the timid conventional style hitherto in vogue, and to adopt the bold and vigorous manner which became characteristic of the school of Seville. He drew, we are told, with charred reeds, and painted with a housepainter's brush. It is said that on occasions he would employ a servant to smear the paints on his canvas with a coarse brush, and then himself shape the rough masses into figures and draperies. In the Louvre there is an important picture by Herrera, "St. Basil dictating his Doctrine," of which Théophile Gautier said that it was "dashed off with an unimaginable fury of the brush, and blazed with the flashing of some auto-da-fè." In the Earl of Clarendon's Collection are three powerful pictures (shown at the New Gallery, 1895-96) representing scenes in the life of St. Bonaventura. But most of Herrera's extant works, in oil and fresco, remain at Seville. The vigour of his style was equalled by the impetuosity of his temper. Pupils flocked round him, but the violence of his outbursts drove them away. Among this number was Velazquez. He perverted his talent as an engraver of medals to the work of coining, and when suspected of this offence fled for sanctuary to the Jesuits' College. There he painted a picture which was shown to Philip IV. "What need," said the King, "has a man gifted with abilities like yours of silver and gold? Go, you are free; and take care that you do not get into this scrape again." He could not, however, change his violent habits, and his children, we are told, robbed him and fled from his house. In 1650 Herrera removed to Madrid, where he had the pleasure, or mortification, of seeing his former pupil, Velazquez, at the height of his fame.

A work in the painter's less impetuous style, but marked by the vigour characteristic of the Spanish and Italian "naturalists."