On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

A collection of Spanish Art at the New Gallery contains such representation as it has been possible to acquire of Murillo, Ribera, and Zurbaran—and even of the artists of our own century: Goya, Madrazo, Fortuny—but nothing that vies for a moment in attractiveness and vitality with the work of Velasquez. Unfortunately, it does not include two of the most important of those canvases of Velasquez which have a resting-place in England—Mr. Bankes’s priceless ‘document’ (for it is that and something besides), the first study, we mean, at Kingston Lacy, for the great Madrid picture of ‘Las Meninas,’ and the yet more important, because the even more exceptional and more perfected picture, the astonishing ‘Venus,’ whose home for many years has been at a small country house upon the borders of two counties in the North. The sketch—the oil sketch, for Velasquez never made preparatory drawings—the sketch of ‘Las Meninas’ would have recalled appropriately the composition, and conveyed something of the character of a mature masterpiece whose actual presence can never be looked for here; and the recumbent ‘Venus’ would have shown an almost austere artist winning for once an easy triumph in the treatment of a luxurious theme, more properly, or more habitually, Titian’s. But, as it is, the representation of Velasquez, in Regent Street, affords ground for study. We could wish, for our own part, that decorative, even symmetrical, arrangement had been discarded, and that the master’s works, as far as they are here, had been seen close together, with no distracting juxtaposition of paintings of a secondary rank. To have ranged the Velasquez canvases in order of date would have been at least to have facilitated reference and to have assisted observation.

Nothing, perhaps, is earlier, among the canvases of Velasquez now shown, than the large, somewhat straggling picture—with perfect composition yet to learn—of a ‘Peasant Boy Feeding Fowls.’ It comes from Ireland, and is lent by Lady Gregory. It does not, in every particular, want breadth of treatment: it is broader in treatment, indeed, than some things which may presumably have been painted not very long after it. The vigour of perception, the realistic outlook upon life, the point of view, in fact, is hardly less characteristic than in work avowedly mature; yet, to pass on from it to painting of the first Madrid, rather than of the Seville, period, is to move into the presence of a much greater accomplishment. Before taking another step, however, it may be well to glance at one picture like it in subject, and, it is scarcely too much to say, even richer in handling—a picture not Velasquez’s at all, yet a link in the chain of his history, for it is the work of his first master, whose harsh temper drove the youth from his painting-room—Herrera el Viejo: it is a broad and finely treated representation of a bird upon the wing—‘A Partridge.’ This is one among the many interesting loans of Sir Clare Ford, whose opportunities of study have been exceptional, and whose devotion to Velasquez himself is indeed hereditary.

The Duke of Wellington is the owner of what seems to be the first picture by Velasquez of whose history there is authentic record. We saw it at the Royal Academy, one winter, in bygone years. It is called the ‘Water-Carrier,’ or ‘El Corno, Aquador de Sevilla,’ and it represents, with a force and luminousness already extraordinary, a man in tattered brown doublet, bearing in one hand the large earthen jar, and, with the other, tendering a glass of water to a boy standing beside a table. It is recorded in the inventory of Buen Retiro, all but two hundred years ago. Since then its fortunes have been various. The picture figured amongst the impedimenta of Joseph Bonaparte in his flight from Madrid, but at the rout of Vittoria it was captured from his carriage, and Ferdinand VII. afterwards gave it to the Great Duke. Sir Charles Robinson contributes an illustration of the story of Jael and Sisera, painted, possibly, about 1623—a composition in which, it is said, there is to be discerned a portrait of the Conde Duque Olivarez (who at that period summoned Velasquez to Madrid), and a posthumous portrait of the Duke of Alva; and it is suggested that there may be in this canvas an allegorical reference to the assassination of William the Silent. Two figures are in armour. At Madrid, we believe, there are three suits of armour of the Duke of Alva’s—there are ten of Charles the Fifth’s. A typical group of the earlier work of the master may be said almost to end with the presentment of the veteran ‘Spanish Beggar,’ belonging to Sir Francis Cook, and, as it would seem, somewhat unnecessarily questioned by such an industrious authority as Justi, who considers that it is the work of a Fleming. Not even the most audacious of assailants has ventured to throw doubt upon the portrait of ‘Quevedo’—a head and shoulders, black and deep brown-grey—the poet wearing conspicuously those thick and dark-rimmed glasses which, by reason of too assiduous study, he is reported never for a moment after middle life to have been able to dispense with.

With Mr. Huth’s portrait of Philip the Fourth, a full-length, life-size figure, and with the portrait of Don Balthasar, the eldest son of a monarch who would appear to have spent an appreciable portion of his lifetime in the painting-room of Velasquez, the artist reaches the hill-top—a summit, fortunately, from which, even to the end of his days, he was not destined to descend. The ‘Don Balthasar’ is the possession of the Duke of Westminster. It shows the child in a costume enriched with gold and silver, mounted upon a prancing pony, in the courtyard of the palace; and finely painted as the face is, the picture, as a whole, illustrates the justice of Mr. R. M. Stevenson’s contention that in the outdoor full-length portraits, in which ensemble, and atmosphere, realised background even, a sense of the presence of the actual world, must needs count for so much, there is not to be looked for that searching and intimate treatment of the visage which Velasquez reserved in the main for works which were studies of the head alone.

And if the Duke of Westminster’s ‘Don Balthasar’ (not to speak of the Queen’s well-known and splendid representation of the boy) illustrates this—a subordination of the personal portrayal to the general effect—so the very perfection of the study of individuality is evidenced in one or two of the portraits of Philip’s second wife, Mariana of Austria, and in that unsurpassable achievement, the Duke of Wellington’s half-length, or head and shoulders, of Innocent the Tenth. It is probable that in more than one of the portraits of Mariana—those in which she is depicted at full-length—much of the painting of her raiment is due to the hand of some pupil of the master’s. But by Velasquez wholly, as we should surmise, is Sir Francis Cook’s bust of the little lady, and this is the earliest of her portraits here, and is succeeded by Mr. Cuthbert Quilter’s three-quarters length, and by Sir Clare Ford’s extraordinarily fresh and vigorous and thorough rendering of the girl in much the same manner. Greatest of all, perhaps, for colour, character, and—there is no other word for it—‘modernness,’ or actuality, is the ‘Innocent the Tenth.’ It belongs to the Duke of Wellington. Seven years ago we paid it, at the Old Masters, our tribute of homage. It is one of several treatments of the same dignitary, wrought by Velasquez after that voyage to Italy in which the artist had Spinola for companion. But it is one of the most genuine and one of the most intact; and perhaps it is but by an error of phrase that it is described as a ‘repetition’ of the picture at the Hermitage. In it, at all events, the finest qualities of masculine portraiture are combined and displayed. It is said that the key to human expression is most of all at the corners of the mouth. Charged with the love of life, the love of its good things, and the love of domination, is this mouth of Innocent’s. But is his eye less revealing?—wary, here, and shrewd; watchful, yet full of fire. What a study of character, and what a triumph of brush-work! A noble ‘Philip the Fourth,’ harmonious in silver and rose-red, from the Dulwich Gallery, sets forth, certainly not better than this does, the greatness of Velasquez’ mission, nor has it quite as fully as this the pre-eminent decisiveness which is so much of his charm.

(Standard, 30th December 1895.)

FRENCH EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PAINTING

There is plenty of variety in the Exhibition which the Academy proffers to the Londoner this winter; and that was desirable—we may almost say, necessary—for the Old Masters proper—such of them as are shown—have not nearly the attractiveness and importance that have been customary. This, under the circumstances, is scarcely to be wondered at, for while of the Venetian painting there is but the most doubtful or the scantiest trace, the great Dutch and Flemish Masters of the Seventeenth Century are altogether unrepresented. Rembrandt and Rubens, Hobbema and Snyders, De Hooch and Nicholas Maas, are as if they were not. The Second Room, in which they are wont to be gathered together, makes not a sign of them; and the Third or Great Gallery contains a not quite happy or well-balanced representation of the masters of the larger canvas, although we note already one exceptional Claude, one faultless Vandyke, and one superb Velasquez. Even the First Room, which is exclusively English, is not so attractive as it has sometimes been; though here and there a late Turner or an early Cotman, a Hogarth ‘conversation piece,’ vivacious and sterling, or a William Dobson portrait, honest at least and capable, asserts unmistakably the hand of a master. Much of the interest is concentrated upon the newer occupants of the Second Room. Most of them are clever, but many hopelessly incompatible.

This Second Room is given over to the French of two periods. But what have the French of the Eighteenth Century in common with the French of the Nineteenth? They have not even a tradition—they have only a name. In England, as you pass from Richard Wilson to Turner, from Hogarth to the elder Leslie, from Reynolds and Romney, even to Etty and James Ward, the break of continuity is never complete; the elders were in a certain sense the ancestors of the younger men. But in France the incomparable grace of Watteau found no reflection of itself in the powerful brutality of Delacroix. Imagine Corot as the successor of Boucher—or Millet’s vision of the peasantry succeeding to the suave dream of Prud’hon. Yet it is with these juxtapositions of the essentially incompatible—with this momentary joining together of those whom Heaven (or, indeed, the peculiarity of their different genius) has put asunder—that we are face to face at Burlington House. Yet, even as it is, there may be a certain interest in the comparison; and if it is made fairly, the result will be an enhanced appreciation of those great masters of the Eighteenth Century, who were French in spirit as well as in name. Briefly and slightly we will speak of these, and these almost alone.

As the authorities of the National Gallery have never yet been so fortunate as to possess a Watteau, it is well for the nation that we have, at Dulwich, one beautiful and unexceptionable example of his art, and it is well too that that picture is now at Burlington House. This is the canvas known as a ‘Ball under a Colonnade’—the scene an arcade overlooking a garden; a lady and gentleman dancing a minuet in the foreground, and, to right and to left of them, groups of gay, happy people, disposed with Watteau’s naturalness and Watteau’s consummate skill. The condition of the picture is faultless, but this—with the great master of Valenciennes—is scarcely rare. Watteau’s method was not a method of experiment; his technique was as sound as his spirit was vivacious. What is more remarkable—what would be remarkable anywhere—is the perfection of accomplished workmanship, the carrying out to the end, with all the vividness of a sketch, of a conception definite and elaborate from the beginning. The colouring comes as an inheritance from the Venetian—as Watteau’s adaptation of the palette of the supreme decorators. There are many canvases by the master spirit of the French Eighteenth Century larger of touch than this one; there are few more happily intricate or truer to the graceful side of life, in a world finely imagined as well as finely seen.