Among such tendencies the art of Zurbarán and Velázquez was evolved. The works of their youth were almost alike. They are sufficiently distinguished later because, while the first hardly ever left the neighbourhood of Seville, expanding but little, Velázquez, as is known, developed a whole pictorial technique.
Zurbarán was born in 1598. He was therefore a year older than Velázquez. By birth he did not belong to Seville, but to the province of Estremadura. But this notwithstanding, he grew up among the artistic influences of Andalusia, for the young painter arrived in Seville at the age of sixteen years, so that he is regarded as one of the greatest figures of the Sevillean School. For twenty-five years the artist was famous for his figures of virgins and saints, realistic in character, powerful, well drawn, vigorous and conceived without exaggeration, full of life and individuality. We mention as a work great in conception the Apotheosis of Saint Thomas, housed in the Museum of Seville. It is characteristic of Zurbarán the refractory, who refused to be inspired either by foreign or national influences. This lent him individuality and rendered his productions a series of continuous links between which but little difference can be remarked. He is famous, moreover, for his religious paintings, his monastic visions. These figures of monks in white sheets, which arouse admiration and appear to be carved, such is the relief of their draped folds, are characteristic and full of grandeur, feeling and austerity, and ought to be regarded in the light of actual documents of the monastic life of the Spain of the seventeenth century.
The distinctive feature of the technique of Zurbarán is the luminosity rendered by means of strong contrasts of light and shade. High lights without crudity and shadows without blackness are noticeable, as in the works of Ribera. The grey tones are never heavy, and their quality, harmonious in its blending, diminishes the hardness of the lines of profile, suppressing all rigidity. Zurbarán is, moreover, a painter easily understood, who rarely has recourse to a symbolism more or less appropriate for the expression of thought, and his ideal aspirations always present, in all that refers to form, a manifest passion for reality.
This master was well represented at the Royal Academy. Perhaps there was nothing of great distinction, but the nine works from his brush, all of one kind, were in general very typical and individual, comprising images, saints and figures realistic in character ([Plate VIII.]).
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We have alluded to the manner of Velázquez’s appearance in Seville and the influences under which he commenced his apprenticeship. A multitude of studies seriously executed, some in black chalk, some in colour, were his first essays. While still a youth he painted a number of those works which still astonish by their reality, by their masterly drawing—a quality with which he was naturally endowed—by their sculptural relief, and by their sobriety. Two works may serve as typical of these, both well-known in England, where they now are, The Old Woman Frying Eggs in Sir Herbert Cook’s collection, and the Water-Carrier of Seville, the property of the Duke of Wellington, which we quote as an example of the style and resolution which the artist bestowed during these years upon works of a popular character, and which, to judge from its subject and models, was then a novelty in a school of painting which had produced scarcely anything except portraits and paintings of a religious kind. Other works of a naturalistic tendency, vulgarly called bodegones, or “eating-house” sketches, and some of a religious character, complete the production of those first years of Velázquez, which was so limited in his later years, that he must be described as a painter whose output was relatively small.
When the artist was twenty-four years of age, his father-in-law, Pacheco, a man of influence, advised him to leave Seville, and himself introduced him to the Court of Philip IV, in whose service Velázquez remained for the rest of his life. He was immediately granted a position and salary at the Court, and his first portraits of the Sovereign and members of the Royal Family aroused surprise and admiration. These, and his first subject compositions painted in Madrid, especially that known as Los Borrachos (“The Topers”), in their high excellence show the culmination of all the qualities found in the works painted in Seville during his first years of apprenticeship. Never has the Spanish picaresque spirit, which forms such a brilliant page in the literature of those times, been given a more genuine representation than is to be observed in the canvas just mentioned. If Velázquez had died after painting Los Borrachos, this work alone would have sufficed to have given him supremacy and the title of leader of a school previously indefinite and lacking a fixed and individual point of view.
A little later, at the command of his King, Velázquez went for the first time to Italy. The influence which Italian art exercised upon him has been the subject of discussion. It is not possible in an essay such as this to try to elucidate this point, but it appears manifest that if Italian art was naturally absorbed by his talent, it did not greatly affect his native qualities; and to judge from his subsequent work, it would seem that he showed a constant and single-minded solicitude to achieve an interpretation always actively faithful to nature.
The picture Las Lanzas (“The Lances”); the equestrian portraits of kings, princes and others, in which these personages appear dressed in hunting costume; those of the buffoons of the Court; the Scenes of the Chase in the mountains of El Pardo; and some others of a different type, such as the Christ on the Cross, in the Prado Museum, make up the tale of his output after his brief stay in Italy, and compose what critics have called the second style of Velázquez, more ample and grand than that of his youth, and, as time advances, enriching all the works which come from his brush with those definite grey harmonies which are occasionally almost silvery in tone, so characteristic and so unmistakable.
The painter was for a second time in Italy in the period of his maturity. He then painted the portrait of Pope Innocent X, and executed a bust of Juán de Pareja, which was on view in the exhibition at Burlington House. Returning soon afterwards to Spain, he there addressed himself to the accomplishment of his greater works, which truly reveal a superior art, somewhat enigmatical in its very simplicity, a sublime style which at first sight does not seem to require much comprehension and the view-point of which has given to the Spanish School of all times, as well as to other schools, rich legacies, excellent examples and notable fruits. There belongs to this epoch of his artistry the portraits of kings and princes, the second series of the court dwarfs, even more rich and astonishing than those of the period of his middle years, some religious pictures, mythological works and, lastly, the two great works Las Hilanderas (“The Spinners”) and Las Meninas (“The Maids of Honour”) ([Plates X.] and [Plates XI.].), supreme monuments of a school, models of synthetic art, of astonishing simplicity in their composition, of delicate harmony, eloquent of the study of values, masterpieces, in short, of sublime painting, which, of an apparent modesty, are, notwithstanding, magical works, spontaneous creations, which shew neither exertion, weakness, nor weariness, and which seem to us the result of an art serene and calm, contrary to the influences of great idealistic conceptions, but which, essentially objective, reproduce the natural with a truth which is unsurpassed.