VELASQUEZ AT THE NEW GALLERY
A collectionof 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—thesketch 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 verylong 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 largeearthen 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 theimpedimentaof 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 workof 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 whichensemble, 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 searchingand 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.)