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.
[CHAPTER XIII]
REYNOLDS AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Hitherto we have travelled far and wide in our search for typical examples of the beautiful in painting. We went from Flanders to Italy, from Italy to Germany, back to Holland, and thence to Spain. It is true that we began in England with our first picture, and that we have returned twice, once with Holbein, and again with Van Dyck, both foreign born and trained artists. We will finish with examples of truly native English art.
In the eighteenth century England for the first time gained a foremost place in painting, though the people of the day scarcely realized that it was so. Even the poet Gray, writing in 1763, could say:
Why this nation has made no advance hitherto in painting and sculpture, it is hard to say.... You are generous enough to wish, and sanguine enough to foresee, that art shall one day flourish in England. I, too, much wish, but can hardly extend my hopes so far.
Yet in 1763 Reynolds was forty years of age and Gainsborough but four years younger. Hogarth was even sixty-six, and at work upon his last plate. Although, hitherto, the best painting in England had been done by foreign artists such as Holbein and Van Dyck, yet there had always been Englishmen of praiseworthy talent who had painted pleasing portraits. Hogarth carried this native tradition to a high point of excellence. He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an unaffected and straightforward way. But he was a humourist in paint, and as great a student of human nature as he was of art. His insight into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter. In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six servants in a double row. They might all be characters from Dickens, so vividly and sympathetically humorous is each.
In his engravings Hogarth satirised the lives of all classes of the society of his day. When we look at them we live again in eighteenth-century London, and walk in streets known to fame though now destroyed, thronged with men and women, true to life.