In the king's eldest boy, Baltazar Carlos, who was born in 1629, Velasquez found a model for two or three of his most charming pictures. One is at Castle Howard; a second the equestrian portrait, on a galloping pony, at the Prado; and a third the full length hunting portrait, also at the Prado, in which we see the little prince standing under a tree, gun in hand, with an enormous dog lying beside him. Another is at Vienna, representing him as of about eleven years old, full length, with his hand resting on the back of a chair. All of these owe some of their charm to the youth and attractive personality of the subject; but if we want to see the power of Velasquez without any outside element to help us to appreciate it, there is the portrait of the sculptor Martinez Montanes at the Prado. "The head is wonderful in its colour and its modelling," writes Senor Beruete; "and what a lesson in technique! The eyes, lightly touched with colour, are set deep in their sockets, and surmounted by a strongly marked forehead. The high lights are of a rich impasto, manipulated with extraordinary skill; the greyer tones of the flesh, so true and so delicate, are painted in a way that brings out with marvellous truth, both the soft parts of the cheeks and the harder structure of the face, under which one can follow the bones of the nose and forehead.... Everything in the picture is spontaneous, and one can see that it is a pledge of friendship given by one artist to another; there is nothing here of that artificial arrangement that spoils commissioned portraits even when they are the work of a painter as independent as Velasquez was. One feels here the assurance of an artist who knows that his work will be understood by his friend in the spirit in which it was executed." M. Lefort, the French critic, is even more enthusiastic. "Ah! these redoubtable neighbours," he exclaims, seeing it surrounded by the works of other painters at the Prado. "This canvas makes them look like mere imitations—dead conventional likenesses. Van Dyck is dull, Rubens oily, Tintoret yellow; it is Velasquez alone who can give us the illusion of life in all its fulness!"
In 1649 Velasquez paid his second visit to Rome, where he painted the famous portrait of His Holiness, Pope Innocent X. which is now in the Doria palace. This is exceptional in treatment, inasmuch as it is the only portrait by Velasquez in which the subject is seated—excepting of course equestrian portraits—and instead of the usual quiet tones of grey and brown which he was so fond of employing, the picture of the Pope is a radiant harmony of rose red and white. In its realism it is even more surprising than most of the other portraits, considering how ugly the face had to be made to resemble nature, although the sitter was of a still higher rank than Velasquez's royal master.
Returning to Madrid in 1651, Velasquez never again left Spain, and the remaining twenty years of his life may be considered the third period of his artistic development, inasmuch as no special influence was exerted upon him outside the ordinary and somewhat tedious course of his employment at the Court. To this period are assigned twenty-six pictures—Senor Beruete only admits the authenticity of eighty-three in all, it may be mentioned—twelve of which are royal portraits, seven those of buffoons and dwarfs, three mythological and two sacred subjects, and the two famous pieces of real life, Las Meninas and Las Hilanderas.
Of the royal portraits those of the Infanta Margarita are among the most fascinating, no less from their technical excellence than on account of the youthful charm of the little Princess. The one at Vienna represents her as about three years old, dressed in red, standing by a little table. Of this, Senor Beruete says that it is "one of the most beautiful inspirations of Velasquez, and perhaps one that reveals better than any other his power as a colourist; it is a flower, perfumed with every infantine grace." Another standing portrait, though only a half length, when she was not many years older, is that in the Salon Carré at the Louvre, which is more familiar to us being nearer home and more often reproduced. M. de Wyczewa praises it thus:—"The perfect chefs-d'œuvre collected in this glorious salon pale in the presence of this child portrait; not one of them can bear comparison with this simple yet powerful painting, which seems to aim only at external resemblance and without other effort to attain a mysterious beauty of form and colour." At Frankfort again is a charming picture of the little Princess, whole length, at the age of six or seven—a replica of which is at Vienna. She is dressed in greyish white with trimmings of black, and her hoop skirt is so enormous that her arms have to be stretched out straight to allow her hands to reach the edge of her coat.
Of the three mythological subjects two are in the Prado, namely the Mars and the Mercury and Argus, while the third and most beautiful is the Venus at the Mirror recently purchased for our national collection. These were all of them painted for the decoration of the royal palaces, and we may therefore suppose that the artist was not entirely at liberty either in the choice of his subject or in his method of treating it. Certainly he does not seem to have been fond of painting the nude, unless with men, and it is noticeable that he has posed his model in this case with more modesty and reserve than is to be observed in the pictures of Rubens and Titian. The Holy Church was sternly averse to this class of painting, in which, accordingly, none of the Spanish school indulged; but at the same time the royal galleries did not exclude the most exuberant fancies of Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto, and others, and Velasquez was in all probability commissioned by Philip to paint this Venus—and another which has perished—along with the Mars and Mercury without regard to the ecclesiastical authorities. But it is hardly surprising if Velasquez availed himself less fully of the privilege than a Flemish or Italian painter would no doubt have done, and has given us so chaste and beautiful a realisation of the goddess. Having regard to the scepticism with which this masterpiece was received in England at the time of its purchase for the nation it is worth quoting Senor Beruete's remarks upon it in that connection. "The authenticity of this work," he writes "has found numerous doubters in Spain, less on account of its subject—being the only nude female figure in the whole œuvre of Velasquez—than because so few people ever suspected its existence; but after it was exhibited at Manchester in 1857 and in London in 1890, it was recognised that its attribution to Velasquez was well founded. At the sight of the canvas all doubt vanishes. There, indeed, is the style, the inimitable technique of Velasquez."
This, from the connoisseur who has devoted years of study to the work of the master, and who rejects such well established examples as the Dulwich Philip IV. and the Admiral Pulido Pareja, is surely more conclusive than the academic pedantry of ignorance masquerading as authority.
Bartolomé Estéban Murillo (1617-1682) has always been accounted the most popular of the Spanish painters, and it is only in recent times that his popularity has faded into comparative insignificance on the fuller recognition and understanding of the genius of Velasquez. The intensely Anglican feeling in this country during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
