The King came by a secret passage daily to the studio to watch Velasquez work. There was always a chair for him, and the King even had an easel and sets of brushes and palette with which he played at painting. Pacheco, who had come up to Madrid and buzzed around encroaching on the Samuel Pepys copyright, has said that the King was a skilled painter. But this statement was for publication during the King's lifetime.
When Velasquez could not keep the King quiet in any other way, it seems he made him sit for his picture. The studio was never without an unfinished portrait of the King. From eighteen to fifty-four he sat to Velasquez—and it is always that same tall, spindle-legged, impassive form and the dull, unspeaking face. There is no thought there, no aspiration, no hope too great for earth, no unrequited love, no dream unrealized. The King was incapable of love as he was of hate. And Velasquez did not use his art to flatter: he had the artistic conscience. Truth was his guiding star. And the greatness of Velasquez is shown in that all subjects were equally alike to him. He did not select the classic or peculiar. Little painters are always choosing their subjects and explaining that this or that may be pretty or interesting, but they will tell you it is "unpaintable" —which means that they can not paint it.
"I can write well on any topic—all are alike to me!" said Dean
Swift to Stella.
"Then write me an essay on a broomstick," answered Stella.
And Swift wrote the essay—full of abstruse reasons, playful wit and charming insight.
The long, oval, dull face of Philip lured Velasquez. He analyzed every possible shade of emotion of which this man was capable, and stripped his soul bare. The sallow skin, thin curling locks, nerveless hands, and unmeaning eyes are upon the walls of every gallery of Christendom—matchless specimens of the power to sink self, and reveal the subject.
That is why Whistler is right when he says that Velasquez is the painters' painter. "The Blacksmith" by Whistler shows you the blacksmith, not Whistler; Rembrandt's pictures of his mother show the woman; Franz Hals gives you the Burgomaster, not himself. Shakespeare of all writers is the most impersonal—he does not give himself away.
When Rubens painted a portrait of Philip the Fourth he put a dash of daring, exuberant health in the face that was never there. The health and joy of life was in Rubens, and he could not keep it off his palette. There is a sameness in every Rubens, because the imagination of the man ran over, and falsified his colors; he always gives you a deal of Rubens.
But stay! that expression, "sinking self," is only a figure of speech. At the last, the true artist never sinks self: he is always supreme, and towers above every subject, every object, that he portrays. The riotous health and good-cheer of Rubens marked the man's limitations. He was not great enough to comprehend the small, the delicate, the insignificant and the absurd. Only a very great man can paint dwarfs, idiots, topers and kings. And so the many- sidedness of the great man continually deceives the world into thinking that he is the thing with which he associates; or, on the other hand, we say he "sinks self" for the time, whereas the truth is that in his own nature he comprehends the Whole. Shakespeare being the Universal Man, we lose him in the labyrinth of his winding and wondrous imagination. The greater comprehends the less.
The beginner paints what he sees; or, more properly, he paints what he thinks he sees. If he grows he will next paint what he imagines, as Rubens did. Then there is another stage which completes the spiral and comes back to the place of beginning, and the painter will again paint what he sees.