It was in the spring of 1870 that a little picture called “La Vicaria” was exhibited in Paris at the dealer Goupil’s. A marriage is taking place in the sacristy of a rococo church in Madrid. The walls are covered with faded Cordova leather hangings figured in gold and dull colours, and a magnificent rococo screen separates the sacristy from the middle aisle. Venetian lustres are suspended from the ceiling; pictures of martyrs, Venetian glasses in carved oval frames hang on the wall, richly ornamented wooden benches, and a library of missals and gospels in sparkling silver clasps, and shining marble tables and glistening braziers form part of the scene in which the marriage contract is being signed. The costumes are those of the time of Goya. As a matter of fact, an old beau is marrying a young and beautiful girl. With affected grace and a skipping minuet step, holding a modish three-cornered hat under his arm, he approaches the table to put his signature in the place which the escribano points out with an obsequious bow. He is arrayed in delicate lilac, while the bride is wearing a white silk dress trimmed with flowered lace, and has a wreath of orange blossoms in her luxuriant black hair. As a girl-friend is talking to her she examines with abstracted attention the pretty little pictures upon her fan, the finest she has ever possessed. A very piquant little head she has, with her long lashes and her black eyes. Then, in the background, follow the witnesses, and first of all a young lady in a swelling silk dress of the brightest rose-colour. Beside her is one of the bridegroom’s friends in a cabbage-green coat with long flaps, and a shining belt from which a gleaming sabre hangs. The whole picture is a marvellous assemblage of colours, in which tones of Venetian glow and strength, the tender pearly grey beloved of the Japanese, and a melting neutral brown, each sets off the other and give a shimmering effect to the whole.

The painter, who was barely thirty, bore the name of Mariano Fortuny, and was born in Reus, a little town in the province of Tarragona, on 11th June 1838. Five years after he had completed this work he died, at the age of thirty-six, on 21st November 1874. Short as his career was, it was, nevertheless, so brilliant, his success so immense, his influence so great, that his place in the history of modern painting remains assured to him.

Like French art, Spanish art, after Goya’s death, had borne the yoke of Classicism, Romanticism, and academical influence by turns. In the grave of Goya there was buried for ever, as it seemed, the world of torreros, majas, manolas, monks, smugglers, knaves, and witches, and all the local colour of the Spanish Peninsula. As late as the Paris World Exhibition of 1867, Spain was merely represented by a few carefully composed, and just as carefully painted, but tame and tedious, historical pictures of the David or the Delaroche stamp—works such as had been painted for whole decades by José Madrazo, J. Ribera y Fernandez, Federigo Madrazo, Carlo Luis Ribera, Eduardo Rosales, and many others whose names there is no reason for rescuing from oblivion. They laboured, meditating an art which was not their own, and could not waken any echo in themselves. Their painting was body without soul, empty histrionic skill. As complete darkness had rested for a century over Spanish art, from the death of Claudio Coellos in 1693 to the appearance of Goya, rising like a meteor, so the first half of the nineteenth century produced no single original artist until Fortuny came forward in the sixties.

He grew up amid poor surroundings, and when he was twelve years of age he lost his father and mother. His grandfather, an enterprising and adventurous joiner, had made for himself a cabinet of wax figures, which he exhibited from town to town in the province of Tarragona. With his grandson he went on foot through all the towns of Catalonia, the old man showing the wax figures which the boy had painted. Whenever he had a moment free the latter was drawing, carving in wood, or modelling in wax. It chanced, however, that a sculptor saw his attempts, spoke of them in Fortuny’s birthplace, and succeeded in inducing the town to make an allowance of forty-two francs a month to a lad whose talent had so much promise. By these means Fortuny was enabled to attend the Academy of Barcelona for four years. In 1857, when he was nineteen years of age, he received the Prix de Rome, and set out for Rome itself in the same year. But whilst he was copying the pictures of the old masters there a circumstance occurred which set him upon another course. The war between Spain and the Emperor of Morocco determined his future career. Fortuny was then a young man of three-and-twenty, very strong, rather thick-set, quick to resent an injury, taciturn, resolute, and accustomed to hard work. His residence in the East, which lasted from five to six months, was a discovery for him—a feast of delight. He found the opportunity of studying in the immediate neighbourhood a people whose life was opulent in colour and wild in movement; and he beheld with wonder the gleaming pictorial episodes so variously enacted before him, and the rich costumes upon which the radiance of the South glanced in a hundred reflections. And, in particular, when the Emperor of Morocco came with his brilliant suite to sign the treaty of peace, Fortuny developed a feverish activity. The great battle-piece which he should have executed on the commission of the Academy of Barcelona remained unfinished. On the other hand, he painted a series of Oriental pictures, in which his astonishing dexterity and his marvellously sensitive eye were already to be clearly discerned: the stalls of Moorish carpet-sellers, with little figures swarming about them, and the rich display of woven stuffs of the East; the weary attitude of old Arabs sitting in the sun; the sombre, brooding faces of strange snake-charmers and magicians. This is no Parisian East, like Fromentin’s; every one here speaks Arabic. Guillaumet alone, who afterwards interpreted the fakir world of the East, dreamy and contemplative in the sunshine, has been equally convincing.

L’Art.
MARIANO FORTUNY.

Yet Fortuny first discovered his peculiar province when he began, after his return, to paint those brilliant kaleidoscopic rococo pictures with their charming play of colour, the pictures which founded his reputation in Paris. Even in the earliest, representing gentlemen of the rococo period examining engravings in a richly appointed interior, the Japanese weapons, Renaissance chests, gilded frames of carved wood, and all the delightful petit-riens from the treasury of the past which he had heaped together in it, were so wonderfully painted that Goupil began a connection with him and ordered further works. This commission occasioned his journey, in the autumn of 1866, to Paris, where he entered into Meissonier’s circle, and worked sometimes at Gérôme’s. Yet neither of them exerted any influence upon him at all worth mentioning. The French painter in miniature is probably the father of the department of art to which Fortuny belongs; but the latter united to the delicate execution of the Frenchman the flashing, gleaming spirit of the Latin races of the South. He is a Meissonier with esprit recalling Goya. In his picture “The Spanish Marriage” (La Vicaria) all the vivid, throbbing, rococo world, buried with Goya, revived once more. While in his Oriental pieces—“The Praying Arab,” “The Arabian Fantasia,” and “The Snake Charmers”—he still aimed at concentration and unity of effect, this picture had something gleaming, iridescent and pearly, which soon became the delight of all collectors. Fortuny’s successes, his celebrity, and his fortune dated from that time. His fame flashed forth like a meteor. After fighting long years in vain, not for recognition, but for his very bread, he suddenly became the most honored painter of the day, and began to exert upon a whole generation of young artists that powerful influence which survives even at this very day.

FORTUNY.THE SPANISH MARRIAGE (LA VICARIA).
(By permission of Messrs. Goupil & Co., the owners of the copyright.)

The studio which he built for himself after his marriage with the daughter of Federigo Madrazo in Rome was a little museum of the most exquisite products of the artistic crafts of the West and the East: the walls were decorated with brilliant oriental stuffs, and great glass cabinets with Moorish and Arabian weapons, and old tankards and glasses from Murano stood around. He sought and collected everything that shines and gleams in varying colour. That was his world, and the basis of his art.

Pillars of marble and porphyry, groups of ivory and bronze, lustres of Venetian glass, gilded consoles with small busts, great tables supported by gilded satyrs and inlaid with variegated mosaics, form the surroundings of that astonishing work “The Trial of the Model.” Upon a marble table a young girl is standing naked, posing before a row of academicians in the costume of the Louis XV period, while each one of them gives his judgment by a movement or an expression of the face. One of them has approached quite close, and is examining the little woman through his lorgnette. All the costumes gleam in a thousand hues, which the marble reflects. By his picture “The Poet” or “The Rehearsal” he reached his highest point in the capricious analysis of light. In an old rococo garden, with the brilliant façade of the Alhambra as its background, there is a gathering of gentlemen assembled to witness the rehearsal of a tragedy. The heroine, a tall, charming, luxuriant beauty, has just fallen into a faint. On the other hand, the hero, holding the lady on his right arm, is reading the verses of his part from a large manuscript. The gentlemen are listening, and exchanging remarks with the air of connoisseurs; one of them closes his eyes to listen with thorough attention. Here the entire painting flashes like a rocket, and is as iridescent and brilliant as a peacock’s tail. Fortuny splits the rays of the sun into endless nuances which are scarcely perceptible to the eye, and gives expression to their flashing glitter with astonishing delicacy. Henri Regnault, who visited him at that time in Rome, wrote to a Parisian friend: “The time I spent with Fortuny yesterday is haunting me still. What a magnificent fellow he is! He paints the most marvellous things, and is the master of us all. I wish I could show you the two or three pictures that he has in hand, or his etchings and water-colours. They inspired me with a real disgust of my own. Ah! Fortuny, you spoil my sleep.”

FORTUNY.THE TRIAL OF THE MODEL.
(By permission of Messrs. Boussod, Valadon & Co., the owners of the copyright.)