MANET.Gaz. des Beaux-Arts.
THE GUITARERO.		MANET.LE BON BOCK.
(By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture.)(By permission of M. Faure, the owner of the picture.)

At the great Manchester Exhibition of 1857 Velasquez had been revealed to the English; in the beginning of the sixties he was discovered by the French. William Stirling’s biography of Velasquez was translated into French by G. Brunet, and provided with a Catalogue raisonné by W. Bürger. The works of Charles Blanc, Théophile Gautier, and Paul Lefort appeared, and in a short time Velasquez, of whom the world outside Madrid had hitherto known little, was in artistic circles in Paris a familiar and frequently cited personality, who began not only to occupy the attention of the historians of art, but of artists also. Couture was in the habit of saying to his pupils that Velasquez had not understood the orchestration of tones, that he had an inclination to monochrome, and that he had never comprehended the nature of colour. From the beginning of the sixties France came under the sway of that serious feeling for colour known to the great Spaniard, and Manet was his first enthusiastic pupil. Certain of his single figures against a pearl-grey background—“The Fifer,” “The Guitarero,” “The Bull-fighter wounded to Death”—were the decisive works in which, with astonishing talent, he declared himself as the pupil of Velasquez. W. Bürger praised Velasquez as le peintre le plus peintre qui fût jamais. As regards the nineteenth century, the same may be said of Manet. Only Frans Hals and Velasquez had these eminent pictorial qualities. In the way in which the black velvet dress, the white silk band, and the red flag were painted in the toreador picture, there was a feeling for beauty which bore witness to the finest understanding of the great Spaniard. In his “Angels at the Tomb of Christ” he has sought, as little as did Velasquez in his picture of the Epiphany, to introduce any trace of heavenly expression into the faces, but as a piece of painting it takes its place amongst the best religious pictures of the century. His “Bon Bock”—a portrait of the engraver Belot, a stout jovial man smoking a pipe as he sits over a glass of beer—is one of those likenesses which stamp themselves upon the memory like the “Hille Bobbe” of Frans Hals. “Faure as Hamlet” stands out from the vacant light grey background like the “Truhan Pablillos” of Velasquez. The doublet and mantle are of black velvet, the mantle lined with rose-coloured silk; and the toilette is completed by a broad black hat with a large black feather. He seems as though he had just stepped to the footlights, and stands there with his legs apart, the mantle thrown over the left arm, and his right hand closing upon his sword. The cool harmony of black, white, grey, and rose-colour makes an uncommonly refined effect. Manet has the rich artistic methods of Velasquez in a measure elsewhere only attained by Raeburn, and as the last of these studies he has created in his “Enfant à l’Épée” a work which—speaking without profanity—might have been signed by the great Spaniard himself. In the beginning of the sixties, when he gave a separate exhibition of his works, Courbet is said to have exclaimed upon entering, “Nothing but Spaniards!”

But even this following of the Spaniards indicated an advance upon Courbet; it meant the triumph over brown sauce and a closer approximation to truth. For, amongst all the old masters, Velasquez and Frans Hals—who greatly resemble each other in this respect—are the simplest and most natural in their colouring; they are not idealists in colour like Titian, Paul Veronese, and Rubens, nor do they labour upon the tone of their pictures like the Dutch “little masters” and Chardin. They paint their pictures in the broad and common light of day. Their flesh-tint is truer than the juicy tint of the Venetians, and the fiery red of Rubens, with his shining reflections. Beside Velasquez, as Justi says, the colouring of Titian seems conventional, that of Rembrandt fantastic, and that of Rubens is tinged with something which is not natural. Or, as a contemporary of Velasquez expressed himself: “Everything else, old and new, is painting; Velasquez alone is truth.”

Thus the difference between the youthful works of Manet and those of his predecessor Courbet is the difference between Velasquez and Caravaggio. Of course, in Manet’s earliest pictures there were found the broad, dull red-brown surfaces which characterise the works of the Bolognese and the Neapolitans. A cool silver tone, a shadowless treatment gleaming in silver, has now taken the place of this warm brown sauce. He has the white of Velasquez, his cool subdued rose-colour, his delicate grey which has been so much admired and against which every touch of colour stands out clear and determined, and that celebrated black of the Spaniard which is never heavy and dull, but makes such a light and transparent effect. What is bright is contrasted with what is bright, and light colours are placed upon a silvery grey background. The most perfect modelling and plastic effect is attained without the aid of strong contrasts of shadow. Thus he closed his apprenticeship to the old masters by being able to see with the eyes of that old master whose vision was the truest.

MANET.A GARDEN IN RUEIL.

This was the point of departure for Manet’s further development. The study of Velasquez did not merely set him free from sauce; it also started the problem of painting light. He went through a course of development similar to that of the old Spaniard himself. When Velasquez painted his first picture with a popular turn, the “Bacchus,” he still stood upon the ground of the tenebrous painters; he represented an open-air scene with the illumination of a closed room. Although the ceremony is taking place in broad daylight, the people seem to be sitting in a dingy tavern, receiving light from a studio window to the left. Ten years afterwards, when he painted “The Smithy of Vulcan,” he had emancipated himself from this Bolognese tradition, which he spoke of henceforward as “a gloomy and horrible style.” The deep and sharply contrasted shadows have vanished, and daylight has conquered the light of the cellar. The great equestrian portraits which followed gave Mengs occasion to remark, even a hundred years ago, that Velasquez was the first who understood how to paint what is “ambiant,” the air filling the vacuum between objects. And at the end of his life he solved the final problem in “The Women Spinning.” In the “Bacchus” might be found the treatment of an open-air scene in the key of sauce, but here was the glistening of light in an interior. The sun quivers over silken stuffs, falls upon the dazzling necks of women, plays through coal-black Castilian locks, renders one thing plastically distinct and another pictorially vague, dissolves corporeality, and lends surface the rounding of life. Contours touched with the brightness of light surround the heads of the girls at work. The shadows are not warm brown but cool grey, and the tints of reflected light play from one object to another.

Two remarkable pictures of 1863 and 1865 show that Manet had grasped the problem and was endeavouring in a tentative way to give expression to his ideas.