Spain and Her Colonies, Compiled from the Best Authorities

by Unknown

Early Spanish paintings are feeble imitations of Italian and Flemish art. They lack the simplicity of the one and the realism of the other. In color they are somber and monotonous—two qualities which characterize the whole Spanish school. The value of this school has been curiously overrated. Comparatively speaking of brief existence, it has produced but two great painters—Velasquez and Murillo. Their contemporaries, Zurbaran, Del Mazo, Ribera, Alonso Cano, Herrera and Roelas, were men of ability, no doubt, but they were not masters.

Excellent examples of Velasquez and of Murillo are to be found to-day in the Museum of the Prado at Madrid, and in the Art Gallery of Seville. The cathedrals and churches generally contain works of the principal painters, both of the early and later times; but placed, as a rule, in “Retablos” or altar-pieces, they are poorly exposed and difficult to view.

Don Diego Velasquez de Silva, or simply Velasquez, the greatest painter that Spain has produced, was born at Seville, in 1599, of parents of Portuguese origin, and died at Madrid in 1660. He married in his youth the daughter of Francisco Pacheco, a painter of inferior merit, but a learned writer on art, from whose advice and instruction he derived much advantage. Velasquez showed from his childhood a genius for painting. He began by copying carefully from nature, still life, and living models, forming himself upon the study of pictures by Ribera and by Italian masters of the Naturalistic school, which had been brought from Italy to Spain. The best examples of his first manner are “The Adoration of the Kings” and his famous “Borrachos,” or drunkards, in the Madrid Gallery. In them the influence of Caravaggio and Ribera is very evident. In the twenty-third year of his age he went to Madrid, and, attracting the notice of influential persons, was soon taken into the service of Philip IV.—an enthusiastic lover of art, and himself a painter. He remained there for the rest of his life, and his pictures were almost exclusively painted for his royal patron and for the grandees of the Spanish court. A friendship with Rubens, who was in Madrid as embassador from the King of England, in 1628, and two visits to Italy, in 1629 and 1648, led him to modify his early manner. From the study at Venice of the masterpieces of Titian and Tintoret, he acquired a greater harmony and transparency of color, and a freer and firmer touch, without departing from that truthful representation of nature which he always sought to attain. On his second visit to Italy he chiefly studied in Rome. He again changed his style: his coloring became more what the Italians term “sfumato,” or hazy; and he returned, to some extent, to his early general soberness of tone, rarely introducing bright colors into his last pictures. Velasquez’s second and third manners, as well as his first, are fully represented in the Madrid Gallery, which contains no less than sixty of his pictures, or almost the whole of his genuine works. The “Borrachos” have already been mentioned as an example of his first manner. The fine portrait of the Infante Don Carlos, second son of Philip III., is another. In his second manner are the “Surrender of Breda,” perhaps the finest representation and treatment of a contemporary historical event in the world; the magnificent portrait of the Count of Benavente, and the four Dwarfs. In his third, the “Meninas,” and the “Hilanderas.” By studying these pictures the student will soon be able to distinguish between the three manners of the painter, and to decide for himself as to the genuineness of the many pictures which pass for Velasquez’s in the public and private galleries of Europe.

It was principally as a portrait-painter that Velasquez excelled. Although he wanted the imagination of Titian, and gave less dignity and refinement than that great master to his portraits, yet in a marvelous power of rendering nature, and in truthfulness of expression, he was not his inferior. In the imaginative faculties he was singularly deficient, as his “Forge of Vulcan,” the “Coronation of the Virgin,” and other works of that class in the Madrid Gallery, are sufficient to prove. However, the “Crucifixion,” in the same collection, is a grand and solemn conception, which has excited the enthusiastic admiration of some critics. Velasquez was essentially a “naturalistic” painter. In the representation of animals, especially dogs, and of details such as armor, drapery, and objects of still life, he is almost without a rival. His freedom of touch and power of producing truthful effects by the simplest means are truly wonderful. His aerial perspective his light and shade, his gradations of tone and color, are all equally excellent, and have excited the admiration of Wilkie, and of the best judges of art.

The high offices which Velasquez held at court gave him but little time to paint. The number of his pictures is, therefore, comparatively small. They were principally executed for the royal palaces; those which have escaped the fires that destroyed so many great works have been removed to the Madrid Museum. The portraits which are attributed to him in many public and private collections out of Spain are, for the most part, by his pupils, or imitators and copyists. One of the most skillful of the latter was a certain Lucas, who, not many years ago, succeeded in deceiving many collectors.

Among his best scholars were: Juan Bautista del Mazo (d. 1667), his son-in-law. How nearly he approached his master may be seen by his admirable portrait of D. Tiburcio de Redin, and the view of Saragossa, in which the figures have even been attributed to Velasquez, in the Madrid Gallery. Pareja, his half-caste slave, and afterward freedman (d. 1670), who imitated his master in his portraits, but not in his religious and other subjects, in which he followed the Dutch and Italian painters of the time; as in his “Calling of St. Mark,” in the same gallery. Carreno, a member of a noble family (b. 1614; d. 1685), who succeeded Velasquez as court painter, and who is chiefly known by his portraits of the idiot king (Charles II.), his mother, Mariana of Austria, Don John of Austria (not the hero of Lepanto), and other royal and courtly persons of the period. Spanish writers on art rank him with Vandyke, to whom, however, he was greatly inferior. His coloring is generally insipid, and wanting in vigor.

Bartolome Esteban Murillo was born at Seville in 1616. He studied under Juan del Castillo, a very indifferent painter, but formed his style, like Velasquez, on the works of Ribera and the Italian naturalistic painters. Like that great master, too, he modified his “manner” three times, as he gained in experience and knowledge. From his boyhood he painted pictures which were sold in the market-place of his native city, and bought by dealers; chiefly, it is said, for exportation to the Spanish colonies in America. After obtaining a considerable reputation at Seville, he went to Madrid to improve himself by the study of the works of the great Italian masters in the royal collection. Their influence led him to modify his first style, called by the Spaniards frio (cold), in which he had imitated the brown tints, dark shadows, and conventional treatment of drapery of Ribera; but he did not abandon it altogether. It may still be traced in his second, or calido (warm) manner, as in the celebrated “Holy Family,” called “Del Pajarito,” in the Madrid Gallery. The advice of Velasquez, who treated him with great kindness, and the works of Titian and Rubens, led him to adopt a warm, harmonious and transparent coloring, and a more truthful rendering of nature; at the same time his drawing became more free, if not more correct. His third manner is termed by the Spaniards vaporoso (misty), from a gradual and almost imperceptible fusion of tints, producing a kind of hazy effect. In it are painted, for the most part, his well-known “Miraculous Conceptions,” the Virgin standing on the crescent moon attended by angels. The three manners of Murillo are neither so well defined nor so easily recognized as those of Velasquez. He never completely abandoned one of them for the other, and in his last pictures he frequently returned to the calido style. As a painter of portraits and landscapes, he was inferior to Velasquez. It was only in religious subjects, and especially in his Holy Families, that he surpassed him. His Virgins are taken from the common type of Andalusian beauty, slightly idealized; but he gives to them an expression of youthful innocence and religious sentiment which makes him the most popular of Spanish painters. The Spaniards are naturally proud of him. They believe that he unites the best qualities of the greatest masters, and surpasses them all. All other critics place him second to Velasquez, who unquestionably possessed a more original genius. Comparisons between these two great painters are, however, more than usually pointless and misleading, the two men being essentially different in feeling, taste, and manner.

Returning to Seville, after his first and only visit to Madrid, Murillo established himself there for the rest of his life, painting, with the help of scholars, many pictures for churches and convents in Spain and her colonies. In the Peninsula, his best works are now only found at Madrid and in his native city. The French invaders and the picture-dealers carried the greater number away. Among those most worthy of note at Madrid are the “St. Elizabeth of Hungary tending the Sick,” and the “Patrician’s Dream,” now in the Academy of San Fernando, and the two “Immaculate Conceptions” in the Gallery: at Seville, “St. Thomas of Villanueva distributing Alms to the Poor,” in the public Museum; the “St. Anthony of Padua” in the Cathedral; and the pictures in the Caridad. Of his well-known sunburned beggar-boys and girls there are none, that we know of, in Spain; many of those in European collections are probably by his favorite pupil, Villavicencio, in whose arms he died at Seville in 1682. There is a picture by this painter, who was of a noble family, and rather an amateur than an artist, in the Madrid Gallery, representing a group of boys at play. It has no great merit, but shows how he attempted to imitate his master in this class of subject. He was born in 1635, and died in 1700. The imitations and copies of Murillo by Tobar (d. 1758) are so successful that they frequently pass for originals. The same may be said of some by Meneses, who died early in the 18th century.

Among the contemporaries of Murillo was Iriarte (b. 1620; d. 1685), one of the few landscape-painters that Spain has produced. His landscapes were much esteemed by Murillo, but they are not entitled to rank with the works of any of the great masters in this branch of the art. The Madrid Gallery contains five examples of them.

The following painters may be mentioned among the best and most characteristic of the second class in the Spanish school: Francisco de Zurbaran, born in Estremadura in 1598, died at Madrid 1662, was essentially a religious painter, and his somber coloring and the subjects of his pictures are characteristic of Spanish bigotry and of the Inquisition. In Spain he is chiefly known by his altar-pieces for churches and convents; out of Spain by his monks and friars. A few figures of female saints prove that he was not insensible to grace of form and beauty of color. But he is usually mannered, and without dignity. A disagreeable reddish hue pervades his larger pictures. He formed himself, like his contemporaries, on the study of the Italian painters of the Naturalistic school. Philip IV. is said to have named him “Painter of the King, and King of Painters.” He enjoyed the first title, but did not merit the second. His best work in Spain is, perhaps, the “Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas,” in the Seville Museum. It is a grand, but somewhat stiff and unpleasing composition. Zurbaran is badly represented in the Madrid Gallery. The “Christ Sleeping on the Cross” is the most popular in it. One or two of his works are to be found in the Academy of San Fernando.