Book: The Old Masters and Their Pictures

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Back at Madrid, Philip continued to load Velasquez and his family with
favours, appointing the painter Quarter-Master-General of the king's
household with a salary of three thousand ducats a year, and the right
of carrying at his girdle a key which opened every lock in the palace.

Philip is said to have raised Velasquez to knighthood in a manner as
gracious as the manner of Charles V, when he lifted up Titian's pencil.
In painting one of his most renowned pictures, to which I shall refer
again, 'The Maids of Honour,' Velasquez included himself at work on a
large picture of the royal family. The painter represented himself with
the key of his office at his girdle, and on his breast the red cross of
the Order of Santiago. Philip, who came every day to see the progress of
this picture, remarked in reference to the figure of the artist, that
'one thing was yet wanting, and taking up the brush painted the knightly
insignia with his own royal fingers, thus conferring the accolade with a
weapon not recognized in chivalry.'

As it is believed, Velasquez's court office, with all its prestige and
influence, helped in causing his death. King Philip went in June, 1660,
to the Isle of Pheasants in the river Bidassa, where, on ground which
was neither Spanish nor French, the Spanish and French courts were to
meet and celebrate with the greatest magnificence the marriage of the
Grand Monarque and the Infanta Maria Teresa. One of Velasquez's
official duties was to prepare lodgings for the king on his journeys,
and in this instance the lodging included not only the decoration of the
castle of Fuenterrabia, but the erection of a sumptuous pavilion in
which the interviews of the assembled kings and queens and their
revelries were to be held. Velasquez did his part of the preparations,
and doubtless shared in the royal festivities, but returned to Madrid so
worn out by his undertaking, and by constant attendance on his master,
that he was seized with tertian fever, of which he died a few days
later, while but in his sixty-first year, to the great grief of his
countrymen, and above all of his king. Velasquez's wife, Dona Juana,
died eight days after her husband, and was buried in his grave. The
couple left one surviving child, a daughter, married to a painter.

In one picture, now at Vienna, Velasquez gives a glimpse of his family
life at a time when it would seem that he had four sons and two
daughters, so that the fortunate painter's home had not been free from
one shadow--that of death, which must have robbed him of five of his
children. In this pleasant picture, 'his wife dressed in a brown tunic
over a red petticoat, sits in the foreground of a large room, with a
pretty little girl leaning on her knees, and the rest of her children
grouped around her; behind are the men in deep shadow, one of them,
perhaps, being Mazo, the lover or the husband of the eldest daughter,
and a nurse with a child; and in an alcove Velasquez himself appears,
standing before his easel, at work on a portrait of Philip IV. This is
one of the most important works of the master out of the Peninsula; the
faces of the family sparkle on the sober background like gems. As a
piece of easy actual life, the composition has never been surpassed, and
perhaps it excels even "The Meninas," inasmuch as the hoops and dwarfs
of the palace have not intruded upon the domestic privacy of the
painter's home, in the northern gallery.'[28]

Velasquez seems to have been a man of honour and amiability. He filled
a difficult office at the most jealous court in Europe with credit. He
was true to his friends, and helpful to his brother artists. His
biographer writes of Velasquez as handsome in person, and describes his
costume when he appeared for the last time with his king in the galas at
Pheasants' Isle:--'over a dress richly laced with silver he wore the
usual Castilian ruff, and a short cloak embroidered with the red cross
of Santiago; the badge of the order, sparkling with brilliants, was
suspended from his neck by a gold chain; and the scabbard and hilt of
his sword were of silver, exquisitely chased, and of Italian
workmanship.' In the likeness of Velasquez, which is the frontispiece of
Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's 'Life,' the painter appears as a man of
swarthy complexion, with a long compressed upper lip, unconcealed by his
long, elaborately trimmed moustache; his hair, or wig, is arranged in
two large frizzed bunches on each side of a face which is inclined to be
lantern-jawed. He wears a dark doublet with a 'standing white collar.'

Velasquez's excellence as a painter was to be found, like that of
Rembrandt, in his truth to nature; but the field of truth presented to
the stately Spaniard, while it had its own ample share of humour, was a
widely different field from that which offered itself to the Dutch
burgher. Together with absolute truth, Velasquez had the ease and
facility in expressing truth which are only acquired by a great master.
Like Rubens, Velasquez made essays in many branches of painting. In
sacred art, if we except his 'Crucifixion,' he did not attain a high
place. With regard to his landscapes, Sir David Wilkie bore
witness:--'Titian seems his model, but he has also the breadth and
picturesque effect for which Claude and Salvator Rosa are remarkable;'
and Sir David added of those landscapes, 'they have the very same sun we
see, and the air we breathe, the very soul and spirit of nature.'

Velasquez's _genre_ pictures, to which I shall refer by and by, are
excellent, but the fate was kind which confined him largely to portrait
painting. It was brought as a reproach against Velasquez in his
lifetime, that he could paint a head and nothing else, to which he
replied with mingled spirit, sense, and good nature, that his detractors
flattered him, 'for he knew nobody of whom it could be said that he
painted a head thoroughly well.'

Sir W. Stirling Maxwell asserts of Velasquez's portrait painting, that
no artist 'ever followed nature with more catholic fidelity; his
cavaliers are as natural as his boors; he neither refined the vulgar,
nor vulgarized the refined,' and goes on to quote this among other
criticism:--'his portraits baffle description and praise; he drew the
minds of men; they live, breathe, and are ready to walk out of the
frames.' Sir William winds up with the enthusiastic declaration, 'Such
pictures as these are real history; we know the persons of Philip IV,
and Olivares, as familiarly as if we had paced the avenues of the Pardo
with Digby and Howell, and perhaps we think more favourably of their
characters.'

I shall borrow still further from Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's graphic and
entertaining book, descriptions of two of Velasquez's _genre_ pictures,
'The Maids of Honour,' and the more celebrated 'Spinners,' both at
Madrid. 'The scene (of the first) is a long room in a quarter of the old
palace which was called the prince's quarter, and the subject, Velasquez
at work on a large picture of the royal family. To the extreme right of
the composition is seen the back of the easel and the canvas on which he
is engaged; and beyond it spalette, pausing to converse, and to observe
the effect of his performance. In the centre stands the little Infanta
Maria Margarita, taking a cup of water from a salver which Dona Maria
Augustina Sarmiento, maid of honour to the queen, presents kneeling. To
the left, Dona Isabel de Velasco, another menina, seems to be dropping a
courtesy; and the dwarfs, Maria Barbolo and Nicolas Pertusano, stand in
the foreground, the little man putting his foot on the quarters of a
great tawny hound, which despises the aggression, and continues in a
state of solemn repose. Some paces behind these figures, Dona Marcela de
Ulloa, a lady of honour in nun-like weeds, and a _guardadimas,_ are seen
in conversation; at the far end of the room an open door gives a view of
a staircase, up which Don Josef Nieto, queen's apasentador, is retiring;
and near this door there hangs on the wall a mirror, which, reflecting
the countenance of the king and queen, shows that they form part of the
principal group, although placed beyond the bounds of the picture. The
room is hung with paintings which Palomino assures us are works of
Rubens; and it is lighted by three windows in the left wall, and by the
open door at the end, an arrangement of which an artist will at once
comprehend the difficulties. The perfection of art which conceals art,
was never better attained than in this picture. Velasquez seems to have
anticipated the discovery of Daguerre, and taking a real room, and real
chance grouped people, to have fixed them, as it were by magic, for all
time on his canvas. The little fair-haired Infanta is a pleasing study
of childhood; with the hanging-lip and full cheek of the Austrian
family, she has a fresh complexion and lovely blue eyes, and gives a
promise of beauty which as empress she never fulfilled. Her young
attendants, girls of thirteen or fourteen, contrast agreeably with the
ill-favoured dwarf beside them; they are very pretty, especially Dona
Isabel de Velasco, who died a reigning beauty, and their hands are
painted with peculiar delicacy. Their dresses are highly absurd, their
figures being concealed by long stiff corsets and prodigious hoops; for
these were the days when the mode was--

"Supporters, pooters, fardingales, above the loynes to weare;"

and the _guardainfante_, the oval hoop peculiar to Spain, was in full
blow; and the robes of a dowager might have curtained the tun of
Heidelberg, and the powers of Velasquez were baffled by the perverse
fancy of "Fribble, the woman's tailor." The gentle and majestic hound,
stretching himself and winking drowsily, is admirably painted, and seems
a descendant of the royal breed immortalized by Titian in portraits of
the Emperor Charles and his son.'

'The Spinners:' 'The scene is a large weaving-room, in which an old
woman and young one sit, the first at her spinning-wheel, and the
second winding yarn, with three girls beside them, one of whom plays
with a cat. In the background, standing within an alcove filled with the
light from an unseen window, are two other women displaying a large
piece of tapestry to a lady customer, whose graceful figure recalls that
which has given its name to Terburg's picture of "The Satin Gown." Of
the composition, the painter Mengs observed, "it seemed as if the hand
had no part in it, and it had been the work of pure thought."'
Velasquez, who must have seen many a bull fight, has left the world a
fine example of field sports in 'The Boar Hunt,' in our National
Gallery, a picture which was bought for two thousand two hundred pounds
from Lord Cowley. When ambassador at the Court of Spain, it was given to
him by Ferdinand VII. In a circular pen in the Pardo, 'Philip IV. and a
party of cavaliers display their skill in slaying boars, to a few
ladies, who sit secure in heavy old-fashioned blue coaches,' while
motley groups of courtiers and peasants, huntsmen and hounds, postilions
and their mules fill the foreground. Sir Edwin Landseer remarked of
this picture that he had never before seen 'so much large art on so
small a scale.'

Bartolome Estevan Murillo was born at Seville in 1618, and was therefore
nearly twenty years younger than his great countryman Velasquez. Murillo
seems to have been of obscure origin, and to have begun his life in
humble circumstances. There are traditions of his being self-taught, of
his studying ragged boys, himself little more than a boy, in the gypsy
quarter of Triana in Seville; of his painting in the marketplace, where
he probably found the originals of the heads of saints and Madonnas (by
which he made a little money in selling them for South America) in the
peasants who came to Seville with their fruit and vegetables. In 1642,
Murillo, then twenty-four years of age, visited Madrid, and was kindly
received, and aided in his art by his senior and fellow artist, the
court painter, Velasquez. It had been Murillo's intention to proceed to
England to study under Van Dyck, but the death of the latter put a stop
to the project. Murillo was prevented from making the painter's
pilgrimage to Italy by want of means, but the loss of culture was so far
supplied by the instructions given to him by Velasquez.

In 1645, when Murillo was twenty-seven years of age, he returned to
Seville, and settled there, becoming as successful as he deserved; and
being acknowledged as the head of the school of Seville, where he
established the Academy of Art, and was its first president. Murillo
married, in 1648, a lady of some fortune, and was accustomed to
entertain at his house the most exclusive society of Seville.

In 1682, Murillo was at Cadiz painting a picture of the marriage of St
Catherine in the church of the Capuchins there, when, in consequence of
the accidental fall of the scaffolding, he received so severe an injury,
that he was forced to leave his work incomplete, and to return to
Seville, where he died within a few weeks, aged sixty-four years. He had
two sons, and an only daughter, who was a nun, having taken the veil
eight years before her father's death.

Murillo appears to have been in character a gentle, enthusiastic man,
not without a touch of fun and frolic. He would remain for hours in the
sacristy of the cathedral of Seville before 'the solemn awful picture of
the 'Deposition from the Cross,' by Pedro de Campana. When Murillo was
asked by the sacristan why he stood thus gazing there, the painter
answered, 'I am waiting till these holy men have finished their work.'
By his own desire, Murillo was buried before this picture. Before
another 'too truthful picture of Las dos Cadaveres' in the small church
of the hospital of the Caridad, Murillo used to hold his nose. One of
Murillo's pictures has the odd name of 'La Virgen Sarvilleta,' or the
Virgin of the Napkin. Murillo was working at the Convento de la Merced,
which is almost filled with his works, when the cook of the convent
begged a memorial of him, offering as the canvas a napkin, on which
Murillo at once painted a 'brilliant glowing Madonna,' with a child,
'which seems quite to bound forward out of the picture.'[29]

Murillo's portrait by himself represents him in a dark doublet having
wide sleeves and a square collar closed in front. His thumb is in his
pallet, and the other hand, with fingers taper and delicate as those of
a hand by Van Dyck, holds one of his brushes. The smooth face, with
regular features, is pale and thoughtful, and with the womanliness of
the aspect increased from the dark hair, which is divided slightly to
one side, being allowed to fall down in long wavy curls on the
shoulders.

In spite of the naturalistic studies of his early youth, and even of the
naturalistic treatment which he gave to his first religious work,
Murillo was possessed of greater and higher imagination than Velasquez
could claim, and the longer Murillo lived and worked the more refined
and exalted his ideas became. Unlike Velasquez, Murillo was a great
religious painter, and during the last years of his life he painted
sacred subjects almost exclusively. But, like Velasquez, Murillo was
eminently a Spanish painter--his virgins are dark-eyed,
olive-complexioned maidens, and even his Holy Child is a Spanish babe.

Without the elevation and the training of the best Italian painters,
Murillo has left abundant proofs of great original genius. The painter's
works are widely circulated, but the chief are still in Seville. Six are
in the church of the Caridad, and these six include his famous 'Moses
striking the Rock,' and his 'Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes;' seven
'Murillos' are in the Convento de la Merced, among them Murillo's own
favourite picture, which he called 'Mi Cicadro' of 'St Thomas of
Villaneuva.' 'St Thomas was the favourite preacher of Charles V., and
was created Archbishop of Valencia, where he seemed to spend the whole
of his revenues in charity, yet never contracted any debt, so that his
people used to believe that angels must minister to his temporal wants.
He is represented at his cathedral door, distributing alms, robed in
black, with a white mitre. A poor cripple kneels at his feet, and other
mendicants are grouped around.'

In the cathedral, Seville, is Murillo's 'Angel de la Guarda,' 'in which
a glorious seraph, with spreading wings, leads a little trustful child
by the hand, and directs him to look beyond earth into the heavenly
light;' and his 'St Antonio.' 'The saint is represented kneeling in a
cell, of which all the poor details are faithfully given, while the long
arcade of the cloister can be seen through the half-open door. Above, in
a transparent light, which grows from himself, the Child Jesus appears,
and descends, floating through wreaths of angels, drawn down by the
power of prayer.'[30]

Another of Murillo's renowned pictures is that of the patron saints of
Seville, 'Santa Rufina and Santa Justina,' who were stoned to death for
refusing to bow down to the image of Venus.

With regard to Murillo's pictures of flower-girls and beggar-boys, I
think my readers are sure to have seen an engraving of one of the
former, '_The_ Flower-Girl,' as it is called, with a face as fresh and
radiant as her flowers. In the National Gallery there is a large Holy
Family of Murillo's, and in Dulwich Gallery there is a laughing boy, an
irresistible specimen of brown-cheeked, white-teethed drollery.




CHAPTER X.

ART--NICOLAS POUSSIN, 1594-1665--CLAUDE[31] LORRAINE, 1600-1682--CHARLES
LE BRUN, 1619-1690--WATTEAU, 1684-1721--GREUZE, 1726-1805.


Nicolas Poussin was born at Andely in Normandy in 1594. Of his parentage
little seems to have been ascertained, but it is believed that he was
well educated, and his classical learning in after life was reckoned
great. He was regularly trained to be a painter under a master in his
native town, and afterwards in Paris.

Dissatisfied with the patronage which he received in Paris, Poussin went
to Rome when he was about thirty years of age. In Rome he is said to
have lived on familiar terms with a sculptor whose devotion to antique
art influenced his taste, and lent it the strong classical bent which it
retained. Poussin studied regularly in the school of Domenichino. After
some delay in attracting public notice, 'The Death of Germanicus,' and
'The Capture of Jerusalem,' which Poussin painted for Cardinal
Barberini, won general approval. In 1629, when Nicolas Poussin was in
his thirty-fifth year, he married the sister of his pupil, Gaspar
Dughet, who took Poussin's name, and is known as a painter, inferior to
his master, by the name of Gaspar Poussin.

Nicolas Poussin returned to Paris when he was a middle-aged man, was
presented to the king, Louis XIII., by Cardinal Richelieu, and offered
apartments in the Tuileries, with the title of painter in ordinary, and
a salary of a hundred and twenty pounds a year. Poussin agreed to settle
in Paris, but on his going back to Rome to fetch his wife, and on the
King of France's dying, the attractions of the Eternal City proved too
great for the painter, and in place of removing his home to his native
country, he lived for the rest of his years in Rome, and died there in
1665, when he was seventy-one years of age. Except what can be judged of
him from his work, I do not know that much has been gathered of the
private character and life of Nicolas Poussin, notwithstanding that
there was a biography written of him fifty years ago by Lady Calcott,
and that his letters have been published in Paris. In the absence of
conclusive testimony one may conclude with some probability that he was
'quiet,' like his best paintings; a man who minded his own business, and
did not trouble the world by astonishing actions, good or bad.[32]

In painting his own picture, from which an engraving has been taken,
Poussin's classical preferences seem to have passed into the likeness,
for in the dress of the seventeenth century, the cloak (not unlike a
toga), the massive hand with the heavy signet-ring resting on what looks
like a closed portfolio, the painter has something of the severe air and
haughty expression of an old Roman; still more, perhaps, of the
French-Romans, if I may call them so, of whom revolutionary times
nearly two centuries later, afforded so many examples. This is a
handsome, dignified face, with austerity in its pride. The slightly
curled hair is thrown back with a certain consciousness from the knit
brow, and from the shoulders. There is only the faintest shadow of a
moustache over the cleanly cut, firmly closed mouth.

Poussin painted largely, and his pictures have been often engraved. With
harmonious composition, good drawing and colouring, his pictures alike
profited and suffered from the classical atmosphere in which they had
their being. They gained in that correctness which in its highest form
becomes noble truthfulness, but they lost in freedom. The figures in the
pictures had frequently the statuesqueness which in sculpture suits the
material, but in painting is stiffness.

Nicolas Poussin had an exceptional reputation for a historical painter
in his day. As a landscape painter, Mr Ruskin, while waging war with
Nicolas Poussin's brother-in-law and assumed namesake, Gaspar, notably
excepts Nicolas from his severest strictures, and treats his efforts in
landscape painting with marked respect. At the same time, however, the
critic censures the painter for a want of thorough acquaintance with
nature, and the laws of nature, ignorance not uncommon in any day, and
nearly universal in Nicolas Poussin's day. 'The great master of elevated
ideal landscape,' Mr Ruskin calls Nicolas Poussin, and illustrates his
excellence in one respect, after contrasting it with the slovenliness of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, by describing the vine in Poussin's 'Nursing of
Jupiter,' in the Dulwich Gallery, thus:--

'Every vine-leaf, drawn with consummate skill and untiring diligence,
produces not only a true group of the most perfect grace and beauty, but
one which in its pure and simple truth belongs to every age of nature,
and adapts itself to the history of all time.' 'One of the finest
landscapes that ancient art has produced, the work of a really great
mind,' Mr Ruskin distinguishes the 'Phocian' of Nicolas Poussin in the
National Gallery, before proceeding to point out its faults.

Again, Mr Ruskin, writing of the street in the centre of another
landscape by Nicolas Poussin, indicates it with emphasis:--'the street
in the centre of the really great landscape of Poussin (great in
feeling, at least) marked 260 in the Dulwich Gallery,' The criticism
with which Mr Ruskin follows up this praise is so perfect a bit of
word-painting, that I cannot refrain from writing it down here. 'The
houses are dead square masses, with a light side and a dark side, and
black touches for windows. There is no suggestion of anything in any of
the spaces, the light wall is dead grey, the dark wall dead grey, and
the windows dead black. How differently would nature have treated us.
She would have let us see the Indian corn hanging on the walls, and the
image of the Virgin of the tiled eaves, and the deep ribbed tiles with
the doves upon them, and the carved Roman capital built into the wall,
and the white and blue stripes of the mattresses stuffed out of the
windows, and the flapping corners of the neat blinds. All would have
been there; not as such, not like the corn, nor blinds, nor tiles, not
to be comprehended nor understood, but a confusion of yellow and black
spots and strokes, carried far too fine for the eye to follow;
microscopic in its minuteness, and filling every atom and space with
mystery, out of which would have arranged itself the general impression
of truth and life.' Once more, Mr Ruskin freely admits that 'all the
landscape of Nicolas Poussin is imagination.'

Mr Ruskin's first definition of ideal landscape is in this manner. Every
different tree and leaf, every bud, has a perfect form, which, were it
not for disease or accident, it would have attained; just as every
individual human face has an ideal form, which but for sin and suffering
it would present: and the ideal landscape-painter has realized the
perfect form, and offers it to the world, and that in a sense quite
distinct from the fallacy of improving nature.

But I wish to take my readers further into imaginative landscape, and to
show it to them, if possible, under additional lights. I despair of
succeeding if I cannot do it by one or two simple examples. In passing
through a gallery we may stop before a picture to be struck, almost
startled, by the exact copy which it presents of some scene in nature;
how like the clouds in the sky, the leaves on the trees, the very
plumage of the birds! But pass on to another picture which may or may
not have the same exact likeness, and we are possessed with quite
another feeling; instead of being merely surprised by the cleverness of
the imitation, we feel a thrill of delight at a reproduction of nature.
In this picture there are not only the clouds we remember, but we can
almost feel the shadows which they cast, and the air which stirs them.
These tree-leaves are not only green, or yellow, or russet, they are
tender, or crisp living leaves. One half expects to see the birds'
throats swell, and hear the sweetness or the shrillness of their songs.

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