Velasquez room and placed beside the great original.
“Observe that it lacks the extraordinary silvery tone peculiar to Velasquez and, besides, is too accurate a copy! Velasquez would never have had patience to copy mere accidents of brush-marks, or kinks in the folds of the dress, if he had been copying one of his own pictures. He would preserve the tone, the spirit, the pose of the original, but he would not go seeking to make the same strokes with his brush. The very mechanical accuracy helps to prove this a copy made by a faithful pupil; thus it is!”
The sixty-seven Velasquez pictures are all together in one room. They are admirably hung, in the chronological order they were painted, so that you can follow the painter’s work from the beginning to the end. The impression produced is of a wonderful living autobiography. Every picture is a page on which you may read some momentous event in the artist’s life. You trace his development from the Adoration of the Kings, the earliest picture, to St. Anthony the Abbot visiting St. Paul, perhaps the latest. It is an autobiography that cannot be read at a glance. In that first visit, made in the company of artists to whom the Velasquez room is holy as Mecca to the Mahommedan, I was introduced to the genius who, for the next six months, I was to study and try to understand.
“Why did Velasquez paint so many pictures of fools, dwarfs and gabaloonzy men?” Patsy asked. We were looking at the portrait of El Primo, the dwarf, holding in his tiny hands a big book, looking out from under his slouch hat and long feather with the humpback’s sharp, uncanny eyes.
“Because he could always get one of them to sit for him when the royal sitters disappointed him,” sighed Villegas; “they had more time than the courtiers, and were perhaps the most vigorous and characteristic subjects for painting of all the people he lived among.”
We passed on to the idiot Child of Vallecas. The poor, vacant face seems to flicker at you from the canvas, the weak, wasted hands with the pack of cards never took hold of anything, not even life itself, save with a faltering grasp. At first, when you begin to study Velasquez, you feel it monstrous that his genius should have been wasted on such ridiculous deformities; in the end you accept them all, for the sake of the genius that has immortalized them.
“Look at that hand!” said Villegas, as we were standing before the portrait of Montañez, the sculptor. “How it is painted! With nothing, you may say—zip-zap, two strokes of the brush, and it is a