The most important, or at any rate one of the most popular, of the pupils of Carracci was Domenico Zampieri, commonly called Domenichino (1581-1641). If we are less enthusiastic about him at the present, it may still be remembered that Constable particularly admired him, but it is significant that the four examples in the National Gallery are numbered 48, 75, 77 and 85—there is no more recent acquisition. He had great facility, and his compositions—not always original—are treated with great charm if with no real depth. His most famous picture, the Communion of S. Jerome, now in the Vatican, is closely imitated from Agostino Carracci's.
Guido Reni (1575-1642), even more popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than Domenichino, was as skilful in some respects, but hardly as admirable. The Ecce Homo, bequeathed by Samuel Rogers to the National Gallery, is an excellent example of his ability to charm the sentimentalist, and if ever there should be a popular revival of taste in the direction of the now neglected school of the Carracci, he will possibly resume all the honour formerly paid to him. The same can hardly be predicted for the far inferior Carlo Maratti, Guercino, and Carlo Dolce.
Space forbids me more than the bare mention in these pages of the brilliant revival of painting in Venice during the earlier part of the eighteenth century by Antonio Canale (1697-1768), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1692-1769), Pietro Longhi (1702-1785), and Francesco Guardi (1712-1793). Charming as their excellent accomplishments were, they must give place to more important claims awaiting our attention in other countries.
SPANISH SCHOOL
One of the sensations of the Exhibition of Spanish Old Masters at the Grafton Gallery in the autumn of 1913 was an altar panel, dated 1250, which was acquired by Mr Roger Fry in Paris, and catalogued as of the "Early Catalan School." In view of the fact that this picture is "certainly to be regarded as one of the very oldest of primitive pictures painted on wood in any country ... a decade earlier than the picture by Margaritone in the National Gallery," it seems somewhat dogmatic to assert that while retaining a strongly Byzantine character "the style is distinctly that of Catalonia." What was the style of Catalonia?
So far as the history of the art is concerned, the chapter on Spain is, with one exception, a very short and a singularly uninteresting one, whether Mr Fry's panel was painted in Catalonia or whether it was not; and in spite of every effort to find in this uncongenial country that expansion of painting that might reasonably have been expected to flow from Italy and moisten its barren soil for the production of so wonderful a genius as Velasquez, there is positively nothing earlier than Velasquez, and not very much after him, that has more than what we may call a documentary interest. While in Italy or the Netherlands the names of scores of painters earlier than the seventeenth century are endeared to us by the recollection of the works they have left us, the enumeration of those of the few Spaniards of whom we have any knowledge awakens no such thrill, and if we have ever heard of them, their works mean little more to us than their names. Only when we come within touch of Velasquez does our interest awaken—as in the case of Ribera and Zurbaran—and that is less because of them than because of Velasquez. El Greco was not a Spaniard by birth, but a Cretan; and if he were ranged with the Italians, to whom he more properly belongs, he would scarcely be more famous than some Bolognese masters whose names are now—or perhaps we ought to say, at the present moment—almost forgotten. The announcement that one of his portraits has been sold to an American for £30,000 is of commercial rather than of artistic interest.
If one had to sum up the career and the art of Velasquez in a sentence, it might be done by calling him a Court painter who never flattered. After recording his life from the time when he left his master Pacheco to enter the service of Philip IV. to the day that he died in it, we shall find that only a bare percentage of his work was not commissioned by the king; and in all his pictures which were not simply portraits there is little if anything to be found which is not as literal and truthful a presentment of the model in front of him as the life-like representations of Philip and those about his Court, of which the supreme quality is that of living resemblance, or to put it in more general terms, vivid realism. Gifted as he must have been with an extraordinary vision and a still rarer, if not unique, ability to put down on canvas what he saw, he confined himself entirely within the limits of actuality, and thereby attained to heights which his great contemporaries Rubens and Rembrandt in their noblest flights of imagination never reached.
Velasquez was baptised on the 6th of June 1599, in the church of S. Peter at Seville. He was the son of well-to-do parents; his father, a native of Seville, was named Juan Rodriguez de Silva, his mother Geronima Velasquez. At thirteen years old he had displayed so strong an inclination towards painting that he was put to study under Francisco de Herrera, then the most considerable painter in Spain (his son, also Francisco, was the painter of the Christ Disputing with the Doctors, in the National Gallery), but owing to Herrera's violent temper Velasquez was shortly transferred to the studio of Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he eventually married.
Pacheco who was, besides being an accomplished artist, a man of literary tastes, and much sought after in Seville by the more intellectual class of society, was exceedingly proud of his pupil, and said of him that he was induced to bestow the hand of his daughter upon him "by the rectitude of his conduct, the purity of his morals, and his great talents, and from the high expectation he entertained of his natural abilities and transcendent genius," adding that the honour of having been his instructor was far greater than that of being his father-in-law, and that he felt it no demerit to be surpassed by so brilliant a pupil.
In 1649 Pacheco published a book on painting, in which we are told that the first attempts of Velasquez were studies in still life, or simple compositions of actual figures, called bodegones in Spanish, of which we have a fair example at the National Gallery in the Christ at the House of Martha. Sir Frederick Cook, at Richmond, has another, an Old Woman Frying Eggs, and the Duke of Wellington two more, of which The Water Carrier of Seville is probably the summit of the young painter's achievement before he left Seville, in 1623, and entered the service of Philip IV. as Court painter.