Zamacois, Casanova, and Raimundo de Madrazo, Fortuny’s brother-in-law, show no less virtuosity of the palette. Sea-pieces and little landscapes alternate with scenes from Spanish popular life, where they revel, like Fortuny, in a scintillating medley of colour. Later, in Paris, Madrazo was likewise much sought after as a painter of ladies’ portraits, as he lavished on his pictures sometimes a fine hautgoût of fragrant rococo grace a la Chaplin, and sometimes devoted himself with taste and deftness to symphonic tours de force à la Carolus Duran. Particularly memorable is the portrait of a graceful young girl in red, exhibited in the Munich Exhibition of 1883. She is seated upon a sofa of crimson silk, and her feet rest upon a dark red carpet. Equally memorable in the Paris World Exhibition of 1889 was a pierrette, whose costume ran through the whole gamut from white to rose-colour. Her skirt was of a darker, her bodice of a brighter red, and a light rose-coloured stocking peeped from beneath a grey silk petticoat; over her shoulders lay a white swansdown cape, and white gloves and white silk shoes with rose-coloured bows completed her toilette. His greatest picture represented “The End of a Masked Ball.” Before the Paris Opera cabs are waiting with coachmen sleeping or smoking, whilst a troop of pierrots and pierrettes, harlequins, Japanese girls, rococo gentlemen, and Turkish women are streaming out, sparkling with the most glittering colours in the grey light of a winter morning, in which the gas lamps cast a warm yellow glimmer.

CASADO.THE BELLS OF HUESCA.

Even those who made their chief success as historical painters became new beings when they came forward with such piquant “little paintings.” Francisco Domingo in Valencia is the Spanish Meissonier, who has painted little horsemen before an inn, mercenary soldiers, newspaper readers, and philosophers of the time of Louis XV, with all the daintiness in colour associated with the French patriarch—although a huge canvas, “The Last Day of Sagunt,” has the reputation of being his chief performance. In the year in which he exhibited his “Vision in the Colosseum,” Benliure y Gil made a success with two little pictures stippled in varied colours, the “Month of Mary” and the “Distribution of Prizes in Valencia,” in which children, smartened and dressed in white frocks, are moving in the ante-chambers of a church, decorated for the occasion. Casado, painter of the sanguinary tragedy of Huesca, showed himself an admirable little master full of elegance and grace in “The Bull-Fighter’s Reward,” a small eighteenth-century picture. The master of the great hospital picture, Jimenez, took the world by surprise at the very same time by a “Capuchin Friar’s Sermon before the Cathedral of Seville,” which flashed with colour. Emilio Sala y Francés, whose historical masterpiece was the “Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1493,” delights elsewhere in spring, Southern gardens with luxuriant vegetation, and delicate rococo ladies, holding up their skirts filled with blooming roses, or gathering wild flowers among the grass. Antonio Fabrés was led to the East by the influence of Regnault, and excited attention by his aquarelles and studies in pen and ink, in which he represented Oriental and Roman street figures with astonishing adroitness. But the ne plus ultra is attained by the bold and winning art of Pradilla, which is like a thing shot out of a pistol. He is the greatest product of contemporary Spain, a man with a talent for improvisation as ingenious as it was free, who treated with equal facility the most varied subjects. In the bold and spirited decorations with which he embellished Spanish palaces he sported with nymphs and Loves and floating genii à la Tiepolo. All the grace of the rococo period is cast over his works in the Palais Murga in Madrid. The figures join each other with ease—coquettish nymphs swaying upon boughs, and audacious “Putti” tumbling over backwards in quaint games. Nowhere is there academic sobriety, and everywhere life, pictorial inspiration, the intoxicating joyousness of a fancy creating without effort and revelling in the festal delight of the senses. In the accompanying wall pictures he revived the age of the troubadours, of languishing love-song and knightly romance free from the burden of thought, in tenderly graceful and fluent figures. And this same painter, who filled these huge spaces of wall, lightly dallying with subjects from the world of fable, seems another man when he grasps fragments from the life of our own age in pithy inspirations sure in achievement. His historical pictures are works which compel respect; but those paintings on the most diminutive scale, in which he represented scenes from the Roman carnival and the life in Spanish camps, the shore of the sea and the joy of a popular merry-making with countless figures of the most intense vividness, carried out with an unrivalled execution of detail which is yet free from anything laboured, and full of splendour and glowing colour,—these, indeed, are performances of painting beside which as a musical counterpart at best Paganini’s variations on the G string are comparable—sleights of art of which only Pradilla was capable, and such as only Fortuny painted forty years ago.

Two masters who do not live at home, but in France, have followed still further the modern development of art with great power. The first is Zuloaga. The pictures of this artist have something truly Spanish, something that one as an admirer of Goya looks for eagerly in Spanish pictures. At the first glance the eye receives rather a shock. One seeks in vain for delicate painting of light in Zuloaga, or exquisite harmonies of colour. He places the crudest reds and yellows next to each other, strong, almost brutal, like a poster. With an uncompromising love of truth he paints the rouge-smeared cheeks and blackened eyebrows of his women-about-town, does not even try to make their movements graceful or give their costumes a touch of modish smartness. But what a breadth of conception! With what daring he sweeps his bold strokes over the picture! It is just because he avoids all flattery, because he brings nothing foreign, nothing cosmopolitan into his exclusive world, that the characteristics of Spanish life are mirrored with such truth in his works. Especially in his portrait of the popular poet, Don Miguel de Segovia, the whole picture is suffused with a rare Don Quixote feeling. Velasquez’ Pablillas stands before you reincarnated. It is interesting, too, that Zuloaga, though in France, remains still a Spaniard. Even when he paints Parisiennes he translates toilette and gesture into grandiose Spanish style.

The influence of the French school is much more marked in the second of these Spanish masters, Hermen Anglada. He has come to the front in the exhibitions of the last few years. Besnard has given him much of his refined epicurism, and this French hautgoût lends his pictures a charm which is altogether their own. If you are seeking for unusual and quaint effects you will find them in this Spaniard, who paints pale, colourless women in the most astonishing costumes, places them in the midst of sensuous, misty landscapes, and gives you a glistening potpourri of colours. But Anglada’s work is in itself the best testimony to the fact that the Spain of to-day is getting worn-out and bloodless. There is something senile and sapless in this over-refined art that takes pleasure in nothing but the most extraordinary nuances, and that needs something very unusual to tickle its nerves.

CHAPTER XXXVI

ITALY

Italy has played a very different part from that of Spain in the development of modern art. Even at the World Exhibition of 1855 Edmond About called Italy “the grave of painting” in his Voyage à travers l’Exposition des Beaux-Arts. He mentions a few Piedmontese professors, but about Florence, Naples, and Rome he found nothing to say. The Great Exhibition of 1862 in England was productive of no more favourable criticism, for W. Bürger’s account is as little consolatory as About’s. “Renowned Italy and proud Spain,” writes Burger, “have no longer any painters who can rival those of other schools. There is nothing to be said about the rooms where the Italians, Spanish, and Swiss are exhibited.” To-day there are in Italy a great number of vigorous painters. In Angelo de Gubernati’s lexicon of artists there are over two thousand names, some of which are favourably known in other countries also. But the mass dwindles to a tiny heap if those only are included who have risen from the level of dexterous picture-makers to that of painters of real importance in the world of art.