745. KING PHILIP IV. OF SPAIN.
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).