In the period after his great inspiration, imitation seemed inevitable to his successors. Spanish painting apparently was dead. Yet it was just in this time of degradation that the Spanish school was surprised suddenly by the remarkable art of Goya. Again a great personality filled the Spanish art stage, forcing a reversal of judgment. We forget the usual level of the period’s achievement; we remember only Goya. With him, once more, we are face to face with a new force in art. Spain challenges the world again; and she gives it its most personal, its most daring genius.
Such, in briefest outlines, is the history of Spanish painting.
It will be seen that Spain is not an art-lover’s paradise. There has never been a time when the accomplishment of the Spanish school is really comparable to what the Italian and Flemish schools have achieved. Spain is not a land of great painters. Murillo has sunk to the rank of a second-rate master; Ribera and Zurbaran are yet hardly known outside Spain. El Greco, Velazquez, Goya—these are the only really great names; and Velazquez towers as much above his fellow-artists as Cervantes above his fellow-novelists. Spain’s claim to the world’s attention in the arts, as also in literature, rests upon the accomplishment of individuals more than upon the general average of her work. It is the result of that personal quality—the predominance of character—which rules every department of Spanish achievement. It still lives in the vigorous and characteristic Spanish painters of to-day—such, for instance, as Zuloaga, Anglada-Camarasa, and Sorolla, artists who take high rank among European painters.
It is often contended that Spanish paintings, if we except the works of the masters El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya, are wanting in dignity, wanting in beauty. But are we not too apt to confine beauty to certain forms of accepted expression? Surely, any art that interprets life has beauty; and no one can doubt, who knows the Spanish pictures, that life was the inspiration of these painters.
The Spanish character speaks in every Spanish picture. There is one quality, which at a first knowledge will impress the careful observer, in all these pictures, which, though different, all have one aim—it is their dramatic seriousness. Rarely do you meet with a picture in which the idea of beauty, whether it be the beauty of colour or the beauty of form, has stood first in the painter’s mind. Almost in vain will you search for any love of landscape, for any passage of beauty introduced for its own sake. Pictures of Passion scenes, of Assumptions, of martyrdoms and saintly legends, were painted with a vivid belief in the reality of these things, by men who felt the presence of the Divine life as a part of human life. To see these pictures in which homely details are introduced into the most sacred themes is to understand the Spaniard’s easy familiarity with his religion.
This is the reason why the Spanish painters always treat a vision as a real scene, and why, too, they present religious and saintly characters by Spanish models. There is a Spanish picture by Zurbaran in the National Gallery of London; it is entitled “St. Margaret.” You look at the picture; you see a Spanish lady, her face powdered, as was the fashion; an embroidered saddle-bag hangs on one arm, in the other hand she holds a rosary. She is dressed in the picturesque Andalusian costume. I always smile when I look at this picture, it is so truly Spanish. The incongruity of clothing saintship in the garb of fashion would not be evident to Spanish Zurbaran; he could not see a saint, therefore he painted a woman, but in accordance with the custom of the day he called her a “saint.”
All the Spanish pictures tell stories. The successes of her painters are due to this aim; their failures, to the sacrifice of beauty of ideal to this—a danger from which, perhaps, no painter except Velazquez quite escaped. He alone, faultless in the balance of his exquisite vision, was saved quite from this danger of overstatement. It is the special gift of the whole school, from the time of the early painters of Andalusia to the time of Goya, to present a scene just as the painter supposed it might have happened. Was not their aim to translate life—the life of earth and the truer life of heaven? And to the Spaniard, we must remember, life was always dramatic.
