I shall mention only one more work of Albrecht Duerer's, that which is known as the Emperor Maximilian's Prayer Book. This is pen-and-ink sketches for the borders of a book (as the old missals were illuminated), which are now preserved in the Royal Library, Munich. In these little drawings the fancy of the great artist held high revel, by no means confining itself to serious subjects, such as apostles, monks, or even men in armour, but indulging in the most whimsical vagaries, with regard to little German old women, imps, piping squirrels, with cocks and hens hurrying to listen to the melody.



CHAPTER VI.

LATER ITALIAN ART—GIORGIONE, 1477-1511—CORREGGIO. ABOUT 1493-1534—TINTORETTO, 1512-1574—VERONESE, 1530-1588.

Giorgio Barbarelli, known as 'Giorgione,—in Italian, 'big,' or, as I have heard it better translated, 'strapping George'—was born at Castelfranco, in Treviso, about 1477, the same year in which Titian was born. Nothing is known of his youth before he came to Venice and studied in the school of Gian Bellini along with Titian.

The two men were friends in those days, but soon quarrelled, and Giorgione's early death completed their separation. Titian was impatient and arrogant; Giorgione seems to have been one of those proud, shy, sensitive men—possibly morbidly sensitive, with whom it is always difficult to deal; but it is recorded of him, as it is not recorded of his great compeer, that Giorgione was frank and friendly as an artist, however moody and fitful he might be as a man.

Giorgione soon became known. According to one account, he painted the facade of the house which he dwelt in, for an advertisement of his abilities as a painter, a device which was entirely successful in procuring him commissions; but unfortunately for posterity, these were frequently to paint other facades, sometimes in company with Titian; grand work, which has inevitably perished, if not by fire, by time and by the sea-damp of Venice, for to Venice Giorgione belonged, and there is no sign that he ever left it.

He had no school, and his love of music and society—the last taste found not seldom, an apparent anomaly, in silent, brooding natures—might tend to withdraw him from his art. He has left a trace of his love for music in his pictures of 'Concerts' and of 'Pastorals,' in which musical performances are made prominent. In Giorgione, with his romantic, idealizing temperament, genre[18] pictures took this form, while he is known to have painted from Ovid and from the Italian tales of his time. He was employed frequently to paint scenes on panels, for the richly ornamented Venetian furniture. Giorgione was not without a bent to realism in his very idealism, and is said to have been the first Italian painter who 'imitated the real texture of stuffs and painted draperies from the actual material.'

Giorgione died at the early age of thirty-three years, in 1511. One account represents him as dying of the plague, others attribute his death to a sadder cause. He is said to have had a friend and fellow-painter who betrayed their friendship, and carried off the girl whom Giorgione loved. Stung to the quick by the double falsehood, the tradition goes on to state that Giorgione fell into despair with life and all it held, and so died.

A portrait of Giorgione is in the Munich Gallery; it is that of a very handsome beardless lad, 'with a peculiar melancholy in the dark glowing eyes.'

Giorgione was, like Titian, grand and free in drawing and composition, and superb in colour.[19] Mrs Jameson has drawn a nice distinction between the two painters as colourists. That the colours of Giorgione 'appear as if lighted from within, and those of Titian from without;' that 'the epithet glowing applies best to Giorgione, that of golden to Titian.'

Giorgione's historic pictures are rare, his sacred pictures rarer still; among the last is a 'Finding of Moses,' now in Milan, thus described by Mrs Jameson: 'In the centre sits the princess under a tree; she looks with surprise and tenderness on the child, which is brought to her by one of her attendants; the squire, or seneschal, of the princess, with knights and ladies, stand around; on one side two lovers are seated on the grass; on the other are musicians and singers, pages with dogs. All the figures are in the Venetian costume; the colouring is splendid, and the grace and harmony of the whole composition is even the more enchanting from the naivete of the conception. This picture, like many others of the same age and style, reminds us of those poems and tales of the middle ages, in which David and Jonathan figure as preux chevaliers, and Sir Alexander of Macedon and Sir Paris of Troy fight tournaments in honour of ladies' eyes and the "blessed Virgin." They must be tried by their own aim and standard, not by the severity of antiquarian criticism.'

In portraits Giorgione has only been exceeded by Titian. In the National Gallery there is an unimportant 'St Peter the Martyr,' and a finer 'Maestro di Capella giving a music lesson,' which Kugler assigns to Giorgione, though it has been given elsewhere to Titian. The 'refined voluptuousness and impassioned sombreness' of Giorgione's painting have instituted a comparison between him and Lord Byron as a poet.

Correggio's real name was Antonio Allegri, and he has his popular name from his birth-place of Correggio, now called Reggio; although at one time there existed an impression that Correggio meant 'correct,' from the painter's exceedingly clever feats of fore-shortening.

His father is believed to have been a well-to-do tradesman, and the lad is said to have had an uncle a painter, who probably influenced his nephew. But Correggio had a greater master, though but for a very short time, in Andrea Mantegna, who died when Correggio was still a young boy. Mantegna's son kept on his father's school, and from him Correggio might have received more regular instruction. He early attained excellence, and in the teeth of the legends which lingered in Parma for a full century, his genius received prompt notice and patronage. He married young, and from records which have come to light, he received a considerable portion with his wife.

The year after his marriage, when he was no more than six-and-twenty, Correggio was appointed to paint in fresco the cupola of the church of San Giovanni at Parma, and chose for his subject the 'Ascension of Christ;' for this work and that of the 'Coronation of the Virgin,' painted over the high altar, Correggio got five hundred gold crowns, equivalent to L1500. He was invited to Mantua, where he painted from the mythology for the Duke of Mantua. Indeed, so far and wide had the preference for mythological subjects penetrated, that one of Correggio's earliest works was 'Diana returning from the Chase;' painted for the decoration of the parlour of the Abbess of the convent of San Paulo, Parma.

Correggio was a second time called upon to paint a great religious work in Parma—this time in the cathedral, for which he selected 'The Assumption of the Virgin.' A few of the cartoons for these frescoes were discovered thirty or forty years ago, rolled up and lying forgotten in a garret in Parma; they, are now in the British Museum.

In 1533, Correggio, then residing in his native town, was one of the witnesses to the marriage of his sovereign, the Lord of Correggio. In the following year the painter had engaged to paint an altar-piece for an employer, who paid Correggio in advance twenty-five gold crowns, but the latter dying very soon afterwards, in the forty-first year of his age, 1534, his father, who was still alive, was in circumstances to repay the advance on the picture, which had not been painted.

Correggio is said to have been modest and retiring in disposition, and this, together with the fact that, like Giorgione, he did not have a school, has been suggested as the source of the traditions which prevailed so long in Italy. These traditions described the painter as a man born in indigent circumstances, living obscurely in spite of his genius (there is a picture of Correggio's in England, which was said to have been given in payment for his entertainment at an inn), and leading to the end a life of such ill-requited labour, that having been paid for his last picture in copper money, and being under the necessity of carrying it home in order to relieve the destitution of his family, he broke down under the burden, and overcome by heat and weariness, drank a rash draught of water, which caused fever and death.

The story, disproven as it is, is often alluded to still, and remains as a foil to those flattering and courtly anecdotes which I have been repeating of royal and imperial homage paid to Duerer, Titian, and Holbein. I fancy the last-mentioned stories may have grown from small beginnings, and circulated purely in the artist world; but that the former is an utterance of the engrained persuasion of the great world without, that art as a means of livelihood is essentially non-remunerative in the sense of money-getting.

Modest as Correggio may have been, he was not without pride in his art. After looking for the first time on the St Cecilia of Raphael, Correggio is reported to have exclaimed with exultation, 'And I too am a painter.'

He left behind him on his death a son and a daughter, the former living to be a painter of no great name. In the picture of Correggio in the attitude of painting, painted by himself, we see him a handsome spare man with something of a romantic cavalier air, engaged in his chosen art.

Correggio's pictures go to prove that under his seemingly quiet exterior he was a man of the liveliest sensibilities and the keenest perceptions, His pictures, unlike Titian's in their repose, are full of motion and excitement. Correggio is spoken of as a painter who delighted 'in the buoyance of childish glee, the bliss of earthly, the fervour of heavenly love,' whose radiant sphere of art sorrow rarely clouded; but when sorrow did enter, it borrowed from the painter's own quivering heart the very sharpness of anguish. The same authority tells us of Correggio, that he has painted 'the very heart-throbs of humanity.' But it seems as if such a nature, with its self-conscious veil of forced stillness, must have had a tendency to vehemence and excess; and so we hear that Correggio's fore-shortening was sometimes violent, and the energy of his actors spasmodic; thus the cruelly smart contemporary criticism was pronounced on his frescoes of the 'Assumption of the Virgin,' in which legs and arms in wild play are chiefly conspicuous from below, that Correggio had prepared for the Parmese 'a fricassee of frogs.' In addition, the great modern critic, Mr Ruskin, has boldly accused Correggio 'both of weakness and meretriciousness,' and there is this to be said of a nature so highly strung as Correggio's was strung, that it was not a healthily balanced nature.

But if the painter were really inferior in his sense of form and expression to his great predecessors, he was so great in one department, that in it he was held worthy, not only to found the school of Parma, but to be classed with the first four painters of Italy.

That chiarascuro, or treatment of light and shade, in which Lionardo and Andrea Mantegna were no mean proficients, was brought to such perfection by Correggio, that, as Mrs Jameson has sought to illustrate technical expressions, 'you seem to look through. Correggio's shadows, and to see beyond them the genuine texture of the flesh.' In undulating grace of motion, in melting softness of outline, fixed on a canvas, he surpassed all rivals, including Raphael; and this widely attractive quality ('luscious refinement,' Mr Ruskin terms it) in connection with Correggio's ardent, if undisciplined sensibility, has rendered him one of the most valued of painters; his best paintings being highly prized and costly as the easel pictures attributed to Raphael. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell writes that an old Duke of Modena was suspected of having caused Correggio's 'Notte' to be stolen from a church at Reggio, and that the princes of Este were wont to carry 'The Magdalene Reading' with them on their journeys, while the king of Poland kept it under lock and key in a frame of jewelled silver.

Among Correggio's masterpieces, besides his frescoes, there is at Parma his picture called 'Day,' from the broad flood of daylight in the picture (and doubtless in contrast to his famous 'Notte' or 'Night,' in the Dresden Gallery). Here is a Virgin and Child, with St Jerome presenting to them his translation of the Scriptures, and the Magdalene bending to kiss in adoration the feet of the infant Saviour.

In the Dresden Gallery in addition to the 'Notte' are five pictures, one of the marriage of St Catherine as the Church—the bride, espoused with a ring to the infant Saviour, a favourite subject of Italian painters, and a specially favourite subject with Correggio; and another, the Magdalene reading, half shrouded with her flowing hair, so well known by engravings. I must say a few more words of the 'Notte,'—it is a nativity illuminated entirely by the unearthly glory shining from the Child Christ. Virgin and Child are bathed and half lost in the fair radiance, which falls softly on a shepherd and maiden, leaving the rest of the figures, the stalled beasts, and the surroundings of the stable, in dim shadow.

In our National Gallery there are fine specimens of Correggio. There is an 'Ecce Homo': Christ crowned with thorns, holding out his bound hands, with a Roman soldier softening into pity, Pilate hardening in indifference, and the Virgin fainting with sorrow. There are also 'the Virgin with the Basket,' so named from the little basket in front of the picture; and 'a Holy Family;' and there is a highly-esteemed picture from a mythological subject, 'Mercury teaching Cupid to read in the presence of Venus.'

We must return to the Venice of Titian, and see how his successors, with much more of the true painter in them than the fast degenerating scholars of other Italian schools, were mere men, if great men, matched with Titian.

Tintoretto is only Tintoretto or Tintoret because his father was a dyer, and 'Il Tintoretto' is in Italian, 'the little dyer.' Tintoretto's real name was one more in keeping with his pretensions, Jacopo Robusti. He was born in Venice, in 1512, and early fore-shadowed his future career by drawing all kinds of objects on the walls of his father's dye-house, an exercise which did not offend or dismay the elder Robusti, but, on the contrary, induced him to put the boy into the school of Titian, where Tintoretto only remained a short time. Titian did not choose to impart what could be imparted of his art to his scholars, and, in all probability, Tintoretto was no deferential and submissive scholar. There is a tradition that Titian expelled this scholar from his academy, saying of the dyer's son, that 'he would never be anything but a dauber.'

Tintoret was not to be daunted. He lived to be a bold-tempered, dashing man, and he must have been defiant, even in his boyhood, as he was swaggering in his youth, when he set up an academy of his own, and inscribed above the door, 'The drawing of Michael Angelo and the colouring of Titian.' He had studied and taught himself from casts and theories since he left the school of Titian, and then, with worldly wisdom equal to his daring, he commenced his artistic career by accepting every commission, good or bad, and taking what pay he could get for his work; but, unfortunately for him and for the world, he executed his work, as might have been expected, in the same headlong, indiscriminate spirit, acquiring the name of 'Il Furioso' from the rapidity and recklessness of his manner of painting. Often he did not even give himself the trouble of making any sketch or design of his pictures beforehand, but composed as he painted.

Self-confident to presumption, he took for his inspirations the merest impulses, and considerably marred the effect of his unquestionably grand genius by gross haste and carelessness. He was a successful man in his day, as so energetic and unscrupulous a man was likely enough to be, and his fellow-citizens, who saw principally on the surface,[20] were charmed beyond measure by his tremendous capacity for invention, his dramatic vigour, his gorgeous, rampant richness and glare; or, by contrast, his dead dulness of ornament and colouring; and were not too greatly offended by his occasional untruthfulness in drawing and colouring, and the inequality of his careless, slovenly, powerful achievements. Yet even Tintoret's fascinated contemporaries said of him that he 'used three pencils: one gold, one silver, one lead.'

Naturally Tintoretto painted an immense number of pictures, to only three of which, however, he appended his name. These were, 'The Crucifixion,' and 'The Miracle of the Slave,' two of fifty-seven pictures which he painted for the school of St Roch alone, in Venice; the other was the 'Marriage at Cana,' in the church of Santa Maria della Saluto, Venice.

There is an authentic story told of Tintoretto in his age, which is in touching contrast to what is otherwise known of the man. Dominico, who was a painter, Tintoret had a daughter, Marietta, very dear to him, who was also a painter—indeed, so gifted a portrait painter, as to have been repeatedly invited to foreign courts to practise her art, invitations which she declined, because she would not be parted from her father. To Tintoret's great grief, this daughter died as she was thirty years of age, and her father was in his seventy-eighth year. When her end was unmistakably near, the old man took brush and canvas and struggled desperately to preserve a last impression of the beloved child's face, over which death was casting its shadow.

Tintoretto died four years later, in 1594. His portrait is that of a man who holds his head high and resolutely; he has, strange to say, a somewhat commonplace face, with its massive nose, full eye, short curly beard and hail. The forehead is not very broad, but the head is 'long,' as Scotch people say, and they count long-headedness not only an indication of self-esteem, but of practical shrewdness. Tintoret's power was native, and had received little training; it is a proof of the strength of that power that he could not quench it. His faults, as a painter, I have already had to chronicle in the sketch of the man. He was greatest on large canvases, where his recklessness was lost in his strength; and in portraits, where his quickness in seizing striking traits more than equalled that rapidity of conclusion in realizing, and still more notably in classifying, character, which, to say the least, is liable to error.

Even before Tintoretto lived sacred subjects and art had entirely changed places. In the days of Fra Angelico and the Van Eycks, art was the means by which painters brought before men sacred subjects, to whose design painters looked with more or less of conviction and feeling. By the time that Tintoret painted, sacred subjects were the means by which painters showed their art; means, the design of which was largely lost sight of, and which might be freely tortured and twisted, falsified, well-nigh burlesqued, if, by so doing, painters could better display their originality, skill, and mastery of technicalities. Sacred subjects had become more and more human in the lower sense, and less and less divine. A man who had so little reverence as Tintoret showed for his own higher self, his fellow-men, and his art, would scarcely seem well qualified to take up sacred subjects. But criticism is entirely and hopelessly divided on the question, for while some authorities hold that he made of the awful scene of the Crucifixion a merely historical and decidedly theatrical procession, other authorities maintain that he preserved in that 'great composition' 'repose and dignity, solemnity and reverence.'

Here is M. Charles Blanc, the French art critic's opinion of Tintoret's largest work, seventy-four feet in length and thirty feet in height: The Glory of Paradise, in the great hall or throne-room of the Doge's Palace:—

'If the shadows had not become so black, such a picture would have had something of sublimity; but that sky, without transparency, the lights of which, even, are of a burnt and baked colour, has rather the air of a lit-up Erebus than of a Paradise. Four hundred figures are in motion in this vast enclosure, some naked, others draped, but draped uniformly in a staring red or a hard blue, which form as many spots, in some sort symmetrical. The manner is quick; a little loose, but confident. The models are neither taken from nature nor from the ideal, they are drawn from practice, and are in general only turns of the head, without beauty and without delicacy. The angels are agitated like demons; and the whole—coarse enough in execution as in thought, is imposing nevertheless by mass, movement, and number. It is the striking image of a multitude in the air, a rout in the heavens, or rather in purgatory.'

Here, again, is Mr Ruskin's unequalled estimate of Tintoret's works: 'I should exhaust the patience of the reader if Ion the various stupendous developments of the imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco alone. I would fain join awhile in that solemn pause of the journey into Egypt, where the silver boughs of the shadowy trees lace with their tremulous lines the alternate folds of fair cloud, flushed by faint crimson light, and lie across the streams of blue between those rosy islands like the white wakes of wandering ships; or watch beside the sleep of the disciples among those mossy leaves that lie so heavily on the dead of the night beneath the descent of the angel of the agony, and toss fearfully above the motion of the torches as the troop of the betrayer emerges out of the hollows of the olives; or wait through the hour of accusing beside the judgment-seat of Pilate, where all is unseen, unfelt, except the one figure that stands with its head bowed down, pale like the pillar of moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the Godhead, half wrapt in the whiteness of the shroud. Of these and all other thoughts of indescribable power that are now fading from the walls of those neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavour at a future time to preserve some image and shadow more faithfully than by words; but I shall at present terminate our series of illustrations by reference to a work of less touching, but more tremendous appeal; the Last Judgment in the church of Santa Maria dell' Orto.'

'By Tintoret only has this unimaginable event been grappled with in its verity; not typically, nor symbolically, but as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circumstance he has received with Dante and Michael Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned; but the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in the adoption of this image; he has not stopped at the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon-dragging of the other; but, seized Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake, that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruin of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling like water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes, and caverns, and shadows of the earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam pool; shaking off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the clangour of the trumpets of the armies of God; blinded yet more, as they awake, by the white light of the new heaven, until the great vortex of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment-seat; the Firmament is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and floats, and falls in the interminable, inevitable light; the bright clouds are darkened with them as with thick snow; currents of atom life in the arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly, and higher and higher still, till the eye and thought can follow no farther, borne up, wingless, by their inward faith, and by the angel powers invisible, now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the breath of their condemnation.'

There is only one little work, of small consequence, by Tintoretto in the National Gallery, but there are nearly a dozen in the Royal Galleries, as Charles I. was an admirer and buyer of 'Tintorettos.' Two Tintorettos which belonged to King Charles I, are at Hampton Court; the one is 'Esther fainting before Ahasuerus,' and the other the 'Nine Muses.' With another 'Esther' I have been familiar from childhood by an old engraving. In the congenial to Tintoret, and he has certainly revelled in the sumptuousness of the mighty Eastern tyrant, in royal mantle and ermine tippet, seated on his throne, and stretching his jewelled sceptre to Esther, who is in the rich costume of a Venetian lady of the period, and sinking into the arms of her watchful maids, with a fair baby face, and little helpless hands, having dainty frills round the wrists, which scarcely answer to our notion of the attributes of the magnanimous, if meek, Jewish heroine.

Paul Cagliari of Verona is far better known as Paul Veronese. He was born in Verona in 1530, and was the son of a sculptor. He was taught by his father to draw and model, but abandoned sculpture for the sister art of painting, which was more akin to his tastes, and which he followed in the studio of an uncle who was a fair painter.

Quitting Verona, Paul Veronese repaired to Venice, studying the works of Titian and Tintoret, and settling in their city, finding no want of patronage even in a field so fully appropriated before he came to take his place there. His first great work was the painting of the church of St Sebastian, with scenes from the history of Esther. Whether he chose the subject or whether it was assigned to him, it belonged even more to him than to Tintoret, for Veronese was the most magnificent of the magnificent Venetian painters. From that date he was kept in constant employment by the wealthy and luxurious Venetians. He visited Rome in the suite of the Venetian ambassador in 1563, when he was in his thirty-fourth year, and he was invited to Spain to assist in the decoration of the Escurial by Philip II., but refused the invitation.

Veronese is said to have been a man of kindly spirit, generous and devout. In painting for churches and convents, he would consent to receive the smallest remuneration, sometimes not more than the price of his colours and canvas. For his fine picture now in the Louvre, the 'Marriage of Cana,' he is believed not to have had more than forty pounds in our money. He died when he was but fifty-eight years of age, in 1588. He had married and left sons who were painters, and worked with their father. He had a brother, Benedotto, who was also a painter, and who is thought to have painted many of the architectural backgrounds to Veronese's pictures.

Veronese's portrait, which he has left us, gives the idea of a more earnest and impressionable man than Tintoret. A man in middle age, bald-headed, with a furrowed brow, cheeks a little hollowed, head slightly thrown back, and a somewhat anxious as well as intent expression of face; what of the dress is seen, being a plain doublet with turned-over collar, and a cloak arranged in a fold across the breast, and hanging over the right shoulder like a shepherd's 'maud' or plaid. Looking at the engraving, and hearing of Paul Veronese's amiability and piety, one has little difficulty in thinking of the magnificent painter, as a single-hearted, simple-minded man, neither vain nor boastful, nor masterful save by the gift of genius.

I have called Paul Veronese a magnificent painter, and magnificence is the great attribute of his style; but before going farther into his merits and defects, I should like to quote to you a passage from Mr Ruskin, the most eloquent and dogmatic of art critics, prefacing the passage with the statement that the true lesson which it teaches is particularly needful for women, who, if they love art at all, are apt to regard it chiefly for its sentiment, and to undervalue such proper painter's work, such breadth and affluence and glory of handling, as are to be met with on the canvases of painters like Veronese and Rubens. 'But I perceive a tendency among some of the more thoughtful critics of the day to forget the business of a painter is to paint, and so altogether to despise those men, Veronese and Rubens for instance, who were painters, par excellence, and in whom the expressional qualities are subordinate. Now it is well, when we have strong moral or poetical feeling manifested in painting, to mark this as the best part of the work; but it is not well to consider as a thing of small account the painter's language in which that feeling is conveyed; for if that language be not good and lovely, the man may indeed be a just moralist or a great poet, but he is not a painter, and it was wrong of him to paint.'

It was said of Paul Veronese, that while he had not 'the brilliance and depth of Titian' or the 'prodigious facility' of Tintoret, yet, in some respects, Veronese surpassed both. But he was certainly deficient in a sense of suitability and probability. He, of all painters, carried to an outrageous extent the practice, which I have defended in some degree, of painting sacred and historical subjects as if they had happened in his own day and city. He violated taste and even reason in painting every scene, lofty or humble, sacred or profane, alike, with the pomp of splendour and richness of ornament which were the fashion of the time; but he had a vivid perception of character, and a certain greatness of mind which redeemed his plethora of gorgeousness from monotony or vulgarity.

Veronese is reported to have been far more correct and careful in drawing than was Tintoret, while Veronese's prodigality of colour was a mellowed version of Tintoret's glare or deadness. One of Veronese's best pictures is the 'Marriage of Cana,' painted originally for the refectory of the convent of San Giorgio, Venice, and now in the Louvre. 'It is not less than thirty feet long and twenty feet high, and contains about one hundred and thirty figures, life size. The Marriage Feast of the Galilean citizen is represented with a pomp worthy of "Ormuz or of Ind." A sumptuous hall of the richest architecture; lofty columns, long lines of marble balustrades rising against the sky; a crowd of guests splendidly attired, some wearing orders of knighthood, are seated at tables covered with gorgeous vases of gold and silver, attended by slaves, jesters, pages, and musicians. In the midst of all this dazzling pomp, this display of festive enjoyment, these moving figures, these lavish colours in glowing approximation, we begin after a while to distinguish the principal personages, our Saviour, the Virgin Mary, the twelve Apostles, mingled with Venetian senators and ladies, clothed in the rich costume of the sixteenth century; monks, friars, poets, artists, all portraits of personages existing in his own time; while in a group of musicians he has introduced himself and Tintoretto playing the violoncello, while Titian plays the bass. The bride in this picture is said to be the portrait of Eleanor of Austria, the sister of Charles V, and second wife of Francis I.'[21]

Though Veronese is not greatly esteemed as a portrait painter, it so happens that the highly-prized picture of his in our National Gallery, called 'The Family of Darius before Alexander,' is understood to be family portraits of the Pisani family in the characters of Alexander, the Persian queen, etc., etc. Another of Veronese's pictures in the National Gallery is 'The Consecration of St Nicholas, Bishop of Myra.'



CHAPTER VII.

CARRACCI, 1555-1609—GUIDO RENI, 1575-1642—DOMENICHINO, 1581-1641—SALVATOR ROSA, 1615-1673.

In the falling away of the schools of Italy, and especially of the followers of Michael Angelo and Raphael, into mannerism and exaggeration, fitly expressed in delineation of heathen gods and goddesses, there arose a cluster of painters in the North of Italy who had considerable influence on art.

The Carracci included a group of painters, the founders of the later Bolognese School. Lodovico, the elder of the three, was born at Bologna, 1555. He was educated as a painter, and was so slow in his education, that he received from his fellow-scholars the nickname of 'Il Bue' (the ox). But his perseverance surmounted every obstacle. He visited the different Italian towns, and studied the works of art which contained, arriving at the conclusion that he might acquire and combine the excellences of each. This combination, which could only be a splendid patch-work without unity, was the great aim of his life, and was the origin of the term eclectic applied to his school. Its whole tendency was to technical excellence, and in this tendency, however it might achieve its end, painting showed a marked decline. As an example of the motives and objects supplied by the school, I must borrow some lines from a sonnet of the period written by Agostino Carracci:

'Let him, who a good painter would be, Acquire the drawing of Rome, Venetian action, and Venetian shadow, And the dignified colouring of Lombardy, The terrible manner of Michael Angelo, Titian's truth and nature, The sovereign purity of Correggio's style, And the true symmetry of Raphael;

* * * * *

And a little of Parmegiano'a grace, But without so much study and toil, Let him only apply himself to imitate the works Which our Niccolino has left us here.'

Lodovico opened a school of painting at Bologna, in which he was for a time largely assisted by his cousins. He died 1619.

Agostino Carracci, cousin of Lodovico, was born at Bologna in 1559. His father was a tailor, and Agostino himself began life as a jeweller. He became a painter and an engraver in turn, devoting himself chiefly to engraving. Towards the beginning of the seventeenth century he was with his more famous brother, Annibale, at Rome, where he assisted in painting the Farnese Gallery, designing and executing the two frescoes of Galatea and Aurora with such success, according to his contemporaries, that it was popularly said that 'the engraver had surpassed the painter in the Farnese.' Jealousy arose between the brothers in consequence, and they separated, not before Annibale had perpetrated upon Agostino a small, but malicious, practical joke, which has been handed down to us. Agostino was fond of the society of people of rank, and Annibale, aware of his brother's weakness, took the opportunity, when Agostino was surrounded by some of his aristocratic friends, to present him with a caricature of the two brothers' father and mother, engaged in their tailoring work.

Agostino died at Parma when he was a little over forty, and was buried in the cathedral there, in 1602.

Annibale, Agostino's younger brother, was born in 1560. It was intended by his parents that he should follow their trade and be a tailor, but he was persuaded by his cousin Lodovico to become a painter. After visiting Parma, Venice, and Bologna, he worked with his cousin and teacher for ten years. Annibale was invited to Rome by the Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, to decorate the great hall of his palace in the Piazza Farnese, with scenes from the heathen mythology, for which work he received a monthly salary of ten scudi, about two guineas, with maintenance for himself and two servants, and a farther gift of five hundred scudi. It was a parsimonious payment, and the parsimony is said to have preyed on the mind and affected the health of Annibale, and a visit to Naples, where he, in common with not a few artists, suffered from the jealous persecutions of the Neapolitan painters, completed the breaking up of his constitution. He painted, with the assistance of Albani, the frescoes in the chapel of San Diego in San Giacomo degli Spagnole, and pressed upon his assistant more than half of his pay. Annibale's health had already given way, and after a long illness he died, when forty-nine years of age, at Rome, 1609, and was buried near Raphael in the Pantheon.

The merit of the Carracci lay in their power of execution, and in a certain 'bold naturalism, or rather animalism,' which they added to their able imitations, for their pictures are not so much their own, as 'After Titian,' 'After Correggio,' etc. In this intent regard to style, and this perfecting of means to an end, thought and in a manner neglected. Yet to the Carracci, and their school, is owing a certain studied air of solemnity and sadness in 'Ecce Homos,' and 'Pietas,' which, in proportion to its art, has a powerful effect on many beholders, who prefer conventionality to freedom; or rather, who fail to distinguish conventionality in its traces. Annibale was the most original while the least learned of the Carracci; yet, even of Annibale, it could be said that he lacked enthusiasm in his subjects. His best productions are his mythological subjects in the Farnese Palace. A celebrated picture of his, that of the 'Three Marys' (a dead Christ, the Madonna, and the two other Marys), is at Castle Howard, and has been exhibited at Manchester, and I think also at Leeds. At Manchester it attracted the greatest attention and admiration. I believe this was not only because Annibale Carracci in the 'Three Marys' does attain to a most piteous mournfulness of sentiment, but because such work as that of the Carracci finds readiest acceptance from a general public, which delights in striking, superficial effects. The same reason, in conjunction with the decline of Italian art, may account for the great number of the Carracci school and followers.

Annibale Carracci was one of the first who practised landscape painting and genre pictures, such as 'The Greedy Eater,' as separate branches of art. Two of Annibale's landscapes are in the National Gallery.

Guido Reni, commonly called 'Guido,' was born at Bologna, 1575. His father was a musician, and Guido was intended for the same calling, but finally became a painter and student in the school of the Carracci. He followed Annibale Carracci to Rome, and dwelt there for twenty years. He obtained great repute and favour, but taking offence at some supposed injustice, he left Rome, and settled at last in Bologna, where he established a large school. Though he made great sums of money, which might have enabled him to live in the splendour which he coveted, on account of his addiction to gambling and his grossly extravagant habits, he was constantly in debt, and driven to tax his genius to the utmost, and to sell its fruits for what they would bring, irrespective of what he owed to himself, his art, and to the giver of all good gifts. He died at Bologna, and was buried with much pomp in the church of San Dominico, 1642.

Of Guido we hear that he had three styles: the first, after the vigorous manner of Michael Angelo; the second, in the prevailing ornamental taste of the Rome of his day and the Carracci. This is considered Guido's best style, and is distinguished by its subtle management of light and shade. His third, which is called his 'silvery style,' from its greys, degenerated into insipidity, with little wonder, seeing that at this stage he sold his time at so much per hour to picture-dealers, who stood over him, watch in hand, to see that he fulfilled his bargain, and carried away the saints he manufactured wet from the easel. Such manufactory took him only three hours, sometimes less. His charges had risen from five guineas for a head, and twenty guineas for a whole figure, to twenty times that amount. He painted few portraits, but many 'fancy' heads of saints. Nearly three hundred pictures by Guido are believed to be in existence. Guido's individual distinction was his refined sense of beauty, but it was over-ruled by 'cold calculation,' and developed into a mere abstract conception of 'empty grace' without heart or soul.

His finest work is the large painting of 'Phoebus and Aurora' in a pavilion of the Rospigliosi Palace at Rome. In our National Gallery there are nine specimens of Guido's works, including one of his best 'Ecce Homos,' which belonged to the collection of Samuel Rogers.

Domenico Zampieri, commonly called Domenichino, was another Bolognese painter, and another eminent scholar of the Carracci. He was born in 1581, and, after studying under a Flemish painter, passed into the school of the Carracci. While yet a very young man, Domenichino was invited to Rome, where he soon earned a high reputation, competing successfully with his former fellow-scholar, Guido. Domenichino's 'Flagellation of St Andrew,' and 'Communion of St Jerome,' in payment of which he only received about five guineas; his 'Martyrdom of St Sebastian,' and his 'Four Evangelists,' which are among his masterpieces, were all painted in Rome, and remain in Rome.

Domenichino is said to have excited the extreme hostility of rival painters, and to have suffered especially from the malice of the Neapolitans, when he was invited to work among them. After a cruel struggle Domenichino died in Naples, not without a horrible suspicion of having being poisoned, at the age of sixty, in 1641. One of his enemies—a Roman on this occasion—destroyed what was left of Domenichino's work in Naples.

The painter's fate was a miserable one, and by a coincidence between his fortune and his taste in subjects, he has identified his name with terrible representations of martyrdoms. Kugler writes that martyrdom as a subject for painting, which had been sparingly used by Raphael and his scholars, had come into fashion in Domenichino's time, for 'painters and poets sought for passionate emotion, and these subjects (martyrdoms) supplied them with plentiful food.' Sensationalism is the florid hectic of art's decay, whether in painting or in literature.

Domenichino is accredited with more taste than fancy. He made free use of the compositions of even contemporary artists, while he individualized these compositions. His good and bad qualities are those of his school, already quoted, and perhaps it is in keeping with these qualities that the excellence of Domenichino's works lies in subordinate parts and subordinate characters. There are examples of Domenichino in the National Gallery.

I shall close my long list of the great Italian painters of the past with one who was quite apart from and opposed to the Carracci school, and whose triumphs and failures were essentially his own. Salvator Rosa, born in 1615 near Naples, was the son of an architect. In opposition to his father Salvator Rosa became a painter. Having succeeded in selling his sketches to a celebrated buyer, the bold young Neapolitan started for Rome at the age of twenty years; and Rome, 'the Jerusalem of Painters,' became thenceforth Salvator Rosa's head-quarters, though the character of the man was such as to force him to change his quarters not once or twice only in his life, and thus he stayed some time, in turn, at Naples, Viterbo, Volterra, and Florence. At Volterra the aggressive nature of the painter broke forth in a series of written satires on a medley of subjects—music, poetry (both of which Salvator himself cultivated), painting, war, Babylon, and envy. These incongruous satires excited the violent indignation of the individuals against whom Salvator's wit was aimed, and their efforts at revenge, together with his own turbulent spirit, drove him from place to place.

Salvator Rosa was at Naples 1647, and took part in the riots, so famous in song and story, which made Masaniello, the young fisherman, for a time Captain-General and Master of Naples, when it was, according to law, a Spanish dependency governed by a viceroy. Salvator was in the Compagnia della Morte commanded by Falcone, a battle painter, during the troubles, a wild enough post to please the wild painter, even had he not been in addition a personal adherent of the ruling spirit Masaniello, whom Salvator Rosa painted more than once. After so eventful a life, the painter died peaceably enough in his fifty-ninth year, of dropsy, at Rome, and left a considerable fortune to his only son.

Salvator Rosa was the incarnation of the arrogant, fickle, fierce Neapolitan spirit, and he carried it out sufficiently in an undisciplined, stormy life, without the addition of the popular legend that he had at one time joined a troop of banditti, and indulged in their excesses. The legend seems to have a familiarity with mountain passes, and his love of peopling them appropriately with banditti in action. Salvator Rosa was a dashing battle painter, a mediocre historical painter, and an excellent portrait painter as well as landscape painter. But it is chiefly by the savage grandeur of his mountain or forest landscapes, with their fitting dramatis personae, that he has won his renown. Mr Ruskin, while he allows Salvator's gift of imagination, denounces him for the reckless carelessness and untruthfulness to nature of his painting. Many of Salvator Rosa's pictures are in the Pitti Palace in Florence, and many are in England.



CHAPTER VIII.

RUBENS, 1577-1640—REMBRANDT, 1606 OR 1608-1669—TENIERS, FATHER AND SON, 1582-1694—WOUVERMAN, 1620-1668—CUYP, 1605; STILL LIVING, 1638—PAUL POTTER, 1625-1654—CORNELIUS DE HEEM, 1630.

A long interval elapsed between the Van Eycks and Quintin Matsys, and Rubens; but if Flemish art was slow of growth and was only developed after long pauses, it made up for its slowness and delays by the burst of triumph into which Flemish and Dutch art broke forth in Rubens and his school, in Rembrandt and Cuyp and Ruysdael.

Peter Paul Rubens was born at Siegen in Westphalia, on the day of St Peter and St Paul, 1577. But though Rubens was born out of Antwerp, he was a citizen of Antwerp by descent as well as by so many later associations. His father, John Rubens, a lawyer, an imprudent, thriftless man in character and habits, had been compelled to leave Antwerp in consequence of religious disturbances which broke out there about the time that the northern provinces, more at one and more decided in their union than the southern provinces, established their independence. Rubens spent his early boyhood at Cologne, but on the death of his father when he was ten years of age, his mother, a good and 'discreet' woman, to whom the painter owed much, and confessed his debt, returned with her family to Antwerp. His mother had destined him for his father's profession, but did not oppose her son's preference for art.

After studying under two different artists, and becoming a master in the guild of St Luke, Rubens went to Italy in 1600, when he was a young man of three-and-twenty years of age. He was eight years absent, entering the service of the ducal sovereign of Mantua, being sent by him on a diplomatic mission to Madrid to Philip III, of Spain, visiting on his own account Rome, where he found the Carracci and Guido[22] at the height of their fame, Venice and Genoa, 'leaving portraits where he went.'

With Genoa, its architecture, and its situation, Rubens was specially charmed, but he quitted it in haste, being summoned home to attend the death-bed of his mother, from whom he had parted eight years before; and arriving too late to see her in life. A man of strong feelings in sorrow as in joy, he withdrew into retirement, and resided for his season of mourning in a religious house.

Loving Italy with a painter's enthusiasm, so that to the latest day of his life he generally wrote in Italian, and loved to sign his name 'Pietro Paolo Rubens,' he had intended to return and settle in Mantua, but having been named court painter to the Governess of the Netherlands, Clara Eugenia, and her husband Albert, Rubens had sufficient patriotism and sufficient worldly foresight to induce him to relinquish his idea, and establish himself in his native Antwerp. He was already a man of eminence in his profession, and a man of mark out of it. Go where he would he made friends, and he so recommended himself to his royal patrons by his natural suavity, tact, and sagacity, that he was not only in the utmost favour with them as a right courtly painter, but was employed by them, once and again, on delicate, difficult, private embassies. But it was not only to his patrons that Rubens was endeared, he was emphatically what men call 'a good fellow,' alike to superiors, equals, and inferiors; a frank, honest, bountiful, and generous man. His love of courts and their splendour was the chivalrous homage which a man of his cast of mind paid to the dignity and picturesqueness of high estate.

He married a year after his mother's death, when he was in his thirty-third year. His first wife, Isabella Brant, was a connection of his own (and so was his second wife). He built and painted, in fresco, a fine house in Antwerp, and laid out a pleasant garden, which contained a rotunda, filled with his collection of pictures by the Italian masters, antique gems, etc. etc., already gathered abroad. He set himself to keep house in a liberal fashion, to dispense benefits, and to entertain friends—above all, to paint with might and main in company with his great school, the members of which, like those of Raphael's school where Raphael was concerned, were, for the most part, Rubens' devoted comrades. Counting his work not only as the great object, but the great zest of his life, never did painter receive such sweeping and accumulating commissions, and never, even by Tintoret, were commissions executed with such undaunted, unhesitating expedition.

Withal Rubens frequently left his studio and went abroad, either to act as an unofficial ambassador, or to paint at the special request of some foreign sovereign. Thus he was residing in Paris in 1620, planning for Marie de Medici the series of remarkable pictures which commemorated her marriage with Henry IV. (When I was a little girl, I went occasionally to a country house, the show place of the neighbourhood, where there were copies of this series of Rubens' pictures. I can remember yet looking at them with utter bewilderment, caused by the dubious taste that impelled Rubens to indulge in the oddest mixture of royal personages, high church dignitaries, patron saints, and gods and goddesses.) In 1628 Rubens was in Spain on a mission from his sovereign to her kinsman, Philip IV.; in the following year he was in England, on a service of a similar description to Charles I., from whom, even as Rubens had already received it from King Philip, the painter had the honour of knighthood.

In the mean time Rubens' first wife died, after a union of seventeen years, in 1626; and four years later, in 1630, the painter, when he was a man of fifty years, re-married another connection of his own, Helena Fourment, a girl only in her sixteenth year. Both of his wives were handsome, fair, full-formed Flemish beauties. Elizabeth (in Spanish, Isabella) Brant's beauty was of a finer order than that of her successor, expressing larger capacity of affection and intellect. But on Helena Fourment Rubens doted, while to both women he seems to have been affectionately attached. He has painted them so often, that the face of no painter's wife is so familiar to the art world, and even to the greater world without, as are the faces of these two women, and above all, that of Helena Fourment. He had seven children, who frequently figure in their mothers' portraits. He has left notable portraits of his two sons by his first wife, of his eldest daughter, Clara Eugenia, when eight years of age, and of his daughter Elizabeth, a buxom baby, dressed in velvet and point lace, playing with toys.

After a life of unbroken success and the highest honours, the last distinction conferred on Rubens was, that he was chosen to arrange the gala, and to be the right-hand man who should conduct the Cardinal Infant, the successor of Clara Eugenia, on his first entrance into Antwerp. But the hand of premature disease and death, which not even he could resist, was already on the great painter; his constitution had been undermined by repeated attacks of gout, and he died at the age of sixty years, in 1640. He was the possessor of great wealth at the time of his death, and only a part of his collection, which was then sold, brought so large a sum in those days, as twenty thousand pounds. Rubens' second wife, Helena Fourment, to whom he had been married ten years, survived him, a widow at twenty-six years of age Rubens' portrait is even better known than those of his wives, for, as I have said of Raphael in his popularity, Rubens in his life is the beau-ideal of a painter to the many. The portrait is worthy of the man, with something gallant in the manliness, and with thought tempering what might have been too much of bravado and too much of debonnairete in the traits. His features are handsome in their Flemish fulness, and match well with hazel eyes, chestnut hair, and a ruddy complexion; his long moustache is turned up, and he wears the pointed beard which we see so often in the portraits by Rubens' scholar, Van Dyck. The great flapping hat, worn alike by men and women, slightly cocked to one side, is the perfection of picturesque head gear. Equally picturesque, and not in the slightest degree effeminate on a man like Rubens, is the falling collar of pointed mechlin, just seen above the cloak draped in large folds.

In his own day Rubens was without a rival as a painter. In a much later day Sir Joshua Reynolds pronounced Rubens 'perhaps the greatest master in the mechanical part of the art, the best workman with his tools that ever exercised a pencil.' His consummate excellence lay in his execution and colouring. It is brought as a reproach against his painting, that his noblest characters, even his sacred characters, were but big, brawny, red and white Flemings. His imagination only reached a certain height, and yet, if it were a very earthly Flemish imagination, it could be grandly, as it was always vigorously, earthly and Flemish. At the same time he could be deficient where proportion, and even where all the laws of art, are concerned.

It is right that I should, with regret and shame, say this of Rubens, whose geniality bordered on joviality, and whose age was a grosser age than our own, that he debased his genius by some foul and revolting pictures.

Of the general distinction between Rubens and some of his predecessors I should like to quote Mr Ruskin's passage in his defence:

'A man long trained to love the monk's vision of Fra Angelico, turns in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of Rubens, which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten that, while Angelico prayed and wept in his olive shade, there was different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders:—wild seas to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay; careful breeding of the stout horses and cattle; close setting of brick-walls against cold winds and snow; much hardening of hands, and gross stoutening of bodies in all this; gross jovialities of harvest homes, and Christmas feasts, which were to be the reward of it; rough affections, and sluggish imaginations; fleshy, substantial, iron-shod humanities, but humanities still,—humanities which God had his eye upon, and which won perhaps, here and there, as much favour in His sight as the wasted aspects of the whispering monks of Florence (Heaven forbid that it should not be so, since the most of us cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen and reapers still). And are we to suppose there is no nobility in Rubens' masculine and universal sympathy with all this, and with his large human rendering of it, gentleman though he was by birth, and feeling, and education, and place, and, when he chose, lordly in conception also? He had his faults—perhaps great and lamentable faults,—though more those of his time and his country than his own; he has neither cloister-breeding nor boudoir-breeding, and is very unfit to paint either in missals or annuals; but he has an open sky and wide-world breeding in him that we may not be offended with, fit alike for king's court, knight's camp, or peasants cottage.'

Rubens' works are very many, nearly four thousand pictures and sketches being attributed to him and his scholars. Many are still at Antwerp, many at Madrid, but most are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as the great Duchess of Marlborough would give any price for his works. I can only indicate a very few examples in the different branches of art which he made his own.

First, of his 'Descent from the Cross:' it is a single large group, distinguished by luminous colouring and correct drawing, and with regard to which the mass of white sheet against which the body of Christ is in relief in the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for composition, drawing, and colouring.' Its defects are held to be 'the bustle of the incidents and the dreadfully true delineation of merely physical agony—too terrible, real, picturesque, but not sublime—- an earthly tragedy, not a divine mystery.'

'Remit the anguish of that lighted stare; Close those wan lips! let that thorn-wounded brow Stream not with blood.'

There is a tradition that an accident happened to the picture while Rubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by re-painting the cheek and chin of the Virgin and the arm of the Magdalene.

With regard to another picture of Rubens at Antwerp, 'The Assumption of the Virgin,' it is said that he painted it in sixteen days, for sixteen hundred florins, his usual terms being a hundred florins a-day.

'The Virgin and Serpent' (from the 12th chapter of Revelation) in the Munich gallery is very splendid. The Virgin with the new-born Saviour in her arms is mounting on the wings of an eagle, surrounded by a flood of light. The serpent, encircling the moon on which she stands, is writhing beneath her feet. God the Father is extending his protecting sceptre over her from above. The archangel, clothed in armour, is in fearful combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the child. Although struck by lightning, the dragon is striving to twist his tail round the legs of the angel, and seizes the cloak of the Virgin with one of his hands. Other infernal monsters are writhing with impotent rage, and falling with the dragon into the abyss.'

'Nothing was more characteristic of Rubens than his choice of subjects from the mythology of the Greeks and the works of the ancient poets; and in nothing did he display more freedom, originality, and poetry.' Among his most famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons,' now at Munich. 'The women are driven back by the Greeks over the river Thermodon; two horses are in savage combat on the bridge; one Amazon is torn from her horse; a second is dragged along by a sable steed, and falling headlong into the river, where others are swimming and struggling. No other battle-piece, save that of the Amazons, can compare with Raphael's "Battle of Constantine."'

Another great picture is The 'Carrying off of Proserpine.' 'Pluto in his car is driven by fiery brown steeds, and is bearing away the goddess, resisting and struggling. The picture absolutely glows with genial fire. The forms in it are more slender than is general with Rubens. Among the companions of Proserpine the figure of Diana is conspicuous for grace and beauty. The victorious god of love hovers before the chariot, and the blue ocean, warmly tinted with the sunbeams, forms a splendid back-ground.'[23]

Rubens was famous for the loveliness and grace of his paintings of children. Perhaps the most beautiful is that of 'The Infant Jesus and John playing with a Lamb.'

Rubens was a great animal painter. One of his celebrated animal pictures is 'Daniel in the Lions' Den,' now at Hamilton Palace, in which each lion is a king of beasts checked in his fiercest have been painted by Rubens in a fit of pique at a false report which had been circulated that he could not paint animals, and that those in his pictures were supplied by the animal-painter, his friend and scholar, Schneyders.

Rubens' landscapes are not the least renowned of his pictures. He gave to his own rich but prosaic Flanders, all the breadth and breeziness and matchless aerial effects of a master of painting, and a true lover of nature under every aspect, who can indeed distinguish, under the most ordinary aspect, those hidden treasures which all but a lover and a man of genius would pass by. His 'Prairie of Laacken,' 'with the sun of Flanders piercing the dense yellow clouds with the force of fire,' is of great repute.

Among his famous portraits I shall mention that called 'The Four Philosophers' (Justus Lepsius, Hugo Grotius, Rubens, and his brother), with peaked beards and moustaches, in turned-over collars, ruffs and fur-trimmed robes, having books and pens, a dog, and a classic bust as accessories. The open pillared door is wreathed with a spray from without, and there is a landscape in the background. This portrait is full of power, freedom, and splendid painting.

Another portrait contains that sweetest of Rubens' not often sweet faces, called 'the Lady in the Straw Hat.' Rubens himself did not name the picture otherwise in his catalogue. Tradition says the original was Mdlle Lundens, the beauty of the seventeen provinces, and that she died young and unmarried. Connoisseurs value the picture because of the triumph of skill by which Rubens has painted brilliantly a face so much in the shade; to those who are not connoisseurs I imagine the picture must speak for itself, in its graceful, tender beauty. Forming part of the collection of the late Sir Robert Peel (I think he gave three thousand pounds for 'the Lady in the Straw Hat'), which has been bought for the country, this beautiful portrait is now in the National Gallery.

And now I must speak of the picture of the Arundel Family. But first, a word about Thomas, Earl of Arundel. It is impossible to write an English work on art and omit a brief account of one of England's greatest art benefactors. Thomas, Earl of Arundel, representing in his day the great house of Howard, had a love of art which approached to a mania; and without being so outrageously vain as Sir Kenelm Digby, there is no doubt that the Earl counted on his art collection as a source of personal distinction. James I., himself an art collector, so far humoured the Earl in his taste as to present him with Lord Somerset's forfeited collection, valued at a thousand pounds. But Charles I, and the Earl became rival collectors, and little love was lost between them. The Earl of Arundel impairing even his great revenues in the pursuit, employed agents and ambassadors—notably Petty and Evelyn—all over Europe, to obtain for him drawings, pictures, ancient marbles, gems, etc., etc. When the civil wars broke out, Lord Arundel conveyed his priceless collection for safety to Antwerp and Padua. Eventually it was divided among his sons and scattered far and wide. The only portion of it which fell to the nation, in the course of another generation, was the Greek Marbles, known as the Arundel Marbles, which were finally presented to the University of Oxford. But in Rubens' day all this grand collection was intact, and displayed in galleries at Arundel House, which the mob thought fit to nickname 'Tart Hall;' and through these galleries Rubens was conducted by the Earl.

Lord Arundel desired to have an Arundel family portrait painted for him by Rubens. The Earl was rather given to having Arundel family portraits, for there are no less than three in which he figures. One by Van Somer, in which the hero is pointing somewhat comically with his truncheon to the statues of his collection in the background, and the last one projected by Van Dyck, but executed by an inferior artist, in which various family pieces of armour, swords, and shields, worn at Flodden, or belonging to the poet Earl of Surrey, are introduced in the hands of the sons of the family.

But it is with Rubens' 'Arundel Family,' which, we must remember, ranks second in English family pictures, that we have to do. Thomas, Earl of Arundel, and the Lady Alathea,[24] are under a portico with twisted columns, like those in Raphael's cartoons; a rich curtain, and a landscape with a large mansion are seen beyond. The Countess is seated in a chair of state, with one hand on the head of a white greyhound; she wears a black satin gown, laced ruff, gold bracelets, and pearl necklace. Her hair is light, and decked with pearls and plumes. The Earl stands behind with a hand on her chair. His head is uncovered, the short hair inclining to grey; the whiskers and beard pointed. His vest is olive-coloured, and he has a brown mantle lined with crimson over the shoulders beneath his ruff. There is a little boy—Earl Thomas's grandson, Philip Howard, afterwards Cardinal Howard, in crimson velvet, trimmed with gold lace, and a dwarf on the other side of the dog, with one hand on its back.

Among other masterpieces of Rubens, including the 'Straw Hat,' which are in the National Gallery, there are the 'Rape of the Sabines,' and the landscape 'Autumn,' which has a view of his country chateau, de Stein, near Mechlin. In Dulwich Gallery there is an interesting portrait by Rubens of an elderly lady in a great Spanish ruff, which is believed to be the portrait of his mother.

Rembrandt Van Rhyn is said to have been born near Leyden about 1606 or 1608, for there is a doubt as to the exact date. His father was a miller or maltster, and there is a theory that Rembrandt acquired some of his effects of light and shade from the impressions made upon him during his life in the mill. He was a pupil at the Latin school of Leyden, and a scholar in studios both at Leyden and Amsterdam.

In 1630, when Rembrandt was a mere lad, he seems to have settled in Amsterdam, and married there in 1634, when he was six or eight and twenty years of age, a young Dutchwoman possessed of a considerable fortune, which, in case of her death and of Rembrandt's re-marriage, was to pass to her children, a provision that in the end wrought Rembrandt's ruin. The troubles of his country in the painter's time rendered his prices comparatively small and precarious, and Rembrandt, like Rubens, without Rubens' wealth, was eager in making an art collection and surrounding himself with those very forms of beauty in the great Italian masters' works, in the appreciation of which the Dutch master—judged by his own works—might have been reckoned deficient.

Rembrandt's wife died after eight years of marriage, and left him with one surviving son, Titus, and Rembrandt, having re-married, was called upon to give up the lad's inheritance. This call, together with the expenditure of the sums which Rembrandt had lavished on his collection, was too heavy upon funds never very ample, and the painter, after struggling with his difficulties, became a bankrupt in 1656. His son took possession of Rembrandt's house, and from the sale of the painter's art collection and other resources eventually recovered his mother's fortune, but Rembrandt himself never rose above the misery, degradation, and poverty of this period. He lived thirteen years longer, but it was in obscurity—out of which the only records which reach us, are stories of miserly habits acquired too late to serve their purpose, a desperate resort to low company dating from his first wife's death, and his gradual downfall.

Rubens and Rembrandt have been sometimes contrasted as the painters of light and of darkness; the contrast extended to their lives.

It will read like a humorous anti-climax after so sad a history, when I add that no other painter painted his own likeness so often as Rembrandt painted his. In the engraving before me the face is heavy and stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded by a moustache; there is no hair on the well-fleshed cheeks and double chin. Rembrandt wears a flat cap and ear-rings. He has two rows of a chain across his doublet, and one hand thrust beneath the cloak hanging across his breast.

Rembrandt's great merits were his strong truthfulness, and his almost equally powerful sense of a peculiar kind of picturesqueness. It seems as if the German weirdness perceptible in Albrecht Duerer had in Rembrandt taken a homelier, but a more comprehensible and effective Dutch form. Kugler argues, that the long winter, with its short dark days, of Northern Europe produces in its inhabitants instinctive delight in hearth-warmth and light, and that the pleasure in looking at Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather under the sombre dimness of clouds and tempests than in the brightness of sunshine. But whatever its source, there is a charm so widely felt in that wonderfully perfect surrounding of uncertainty, suspicion, and alarm, with which Rembrandt has encompassed so many of his otherwise prosaic, coarse, and sometimes vulgar Dutch men and women, that we have coined a new word to express the charm, and speak of groups and incidents being Rembrandtesque, as we speak of their being picturesque.

Rembrandt did not always leave the vague thrill of doubt, terror, or even horror, which he sought to produce, to imagination working in the mysterious depths of his shadows. A very famous picture of his is 'Dr Deeman (an anatomist) demonstrating from a dead subject.' In another picture a man stealing from the gloom is in the act of stabbing in the back the unconscious man in the foreground.[25] Rembrandt's originality is as undoubted as his ability, and he was as great in etching as in painting. His defect as a painter was the frequent absence of any evidence in his work of a sense of refinement, grace, or even beauty; this can be said of him who spent means not his own on gathering together images of beauty and grace produced by the pencils and brushes of others. Many of Rembrandt's pictures are in the galleries of Amsterdam and the Hague, and we have many in London. The National Gallery has several examples, including two of Rembrandt's portraits.

Passing over Van Dyck, whom I reserve, as I have reserved Holbein, to class among the foreign painters resident in or closely connected with England, I come to the Teniers—father and son. David the elder was born at Antwerp in 1582, and David the younger also at Antwerp, in 1610. David the younger is decidedly the more eminent painter, though the works of the father are often mistaken for those of the son. The two Teniers' class of subjects was the same, being ordinarily 'fairs, markets, peasants' merry-makings, beer-houses, guard rooms.'

David the younger had great popularity, was court painter to the Archduke of Austria, and earned such an independence, that he bought for himself a chateau at the village of Perck, not very far from the Chateau de Stein of Rubens, with whom David Teniers was on terms of friendly intimacy. There Teniers, like his great associate, lived in the utmost state and bounty, entertaining the noblest of the land. David Teniers married twice, his first wife being the daughter of one of a family of Flemish painters, who were known, according to their respective proclivities in art, by the names of Peasant Breughel, Velvet Breughel, and Hell Breughel. Teniers had many children.

The elder Teniers died at Antwerp in 1649; the younger died at Brussels, and was buried at Perck, in 1694.

The distinction of the Teniers was the extreme fidelity and cleverness with which they copied (but did not explain) the life they knew—the homeliest, humblest aspect of life. They brought out with marvellous accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking that underlying strain of life, the mere rugged genuineness of the Teniers' work recommends itself, and is not without its own pathos; while to very many superficial observers the simple homeliness of the life which the Teniers chose to represent, prevents the observers from missing what should be present in every life. Men and women are only conscious of the defect when the painters wander, now and then, into higher spheres and into sacred subjects, and there is the unavoidable recoil from gross blindness. I have taken the Teniers as the representatives of a numerous school of Flemish and Dutch artists, whose works abound in this country. David Teniers the younger appears at his best, several times, in Dulwich Gallery and the National Gallery.

Philip Wouverman was born at Haarlem in 1620. He was the son of a painter, able, but unrecognized in his own day. Philip Wouverman found few patrons, disposed of his pictures by hard bargains to dealers, was tempted by his want of success to abjure his art, and even went so far, according to tradition, as to burn his studies and sketches, in order to prevent his son pursuing the career which had been to him a career of bitter disappointment. He died at Haarlem, 1668, when he was no more than forty-eight years of age. Yet some nine hundred paintings bear (many of them falsely) Wouverman's name.

With all the truth and excellent execution of his contemporaries and countrymen', Philip Wouverman, who had, as he thought, missed his mark, had something which those successful men lacked—he had not only a feeling for grace, but a touch of sentiment. His scenes are commonly 'road-side inns, hunts, fights;' but along with an inclination to adopt a higher class of actors—knights and ladies, instead of peasants—there is a more refined treatment and a dash of tenderness and melancholy—the last possibly born of his own disastrous fortunes. In his love of horses and dogs, as adjuncts to his groups, he had as great a fondness for a special white horse, as Paul Potter had for black and white cattle.

Albert Cuyp was born at Dort in 1605. He was a brewer by trade, and only painted as an amateur. In spite of this, he was a great landscape painter, and has given delight to thousands by his power of expressing his own love of nature. Little is known of Cuyp's life, and the date of his death is uncertain, farther than it was later than 1638.

In affected enthusiasm, Cuyp has been called the Dutch Claude, but in reality, Cuyp surpassed, Claude in some respects. The distinction, which Mr Ruskin draws between them, is that, while Claude, in the sense of beauty, is the superior to Cuyp, in the sense of truth Claude is the inferior. Besides Cuyp's landscapes, he painted portraits, and what is called 'still life' (dead game, fruit or flower pieces, etc.), but Cuyp's triumph was found in his skies, with their 'clearness and coolness,' and in 'expressions of yellow sunlight.' Mr Ruskin admits, while he is proceeding to censure Cuyp, parts might be chosen out of the good pictures of Cuyp which have never been equalled in art.' On another occasion, Mr Ruskin has this passage full of dry humour in reference to Cuyp:

'Again, look at the large Cuyp in Dulwich Gallery, which Mr Hazlitt considers "finest in the world," and of which he very complimentarily says, "the tender green of the valleys, the gleaming lake, the purple light of the hills" have an effect ought to have apologized before now for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to observe, the other day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet more gratifying information that he was "juicy;" and it is now happily discovered that Cuyp is "downy." Now I dare say that the sky of this first-rate Cuyp is very like an unripe nectarine: all that I have to say about it is, that it is exceedingly unlike a sky. We may see for ourselves Cuyp's lovely landscapes both in the National Gallery and at Dulwich.

Paul Potter was born at Enkhuysen, in North Holland, in 1625, and was the son of a painter. Paul Potter settled, while still very young, at the Hague as an animal painter, and died in his thirtieth year, in 1654. His career, which was thus brief, had promised to be very successful, and he had established his fame, while no more than twenty-two years of age, by painting for Prince Maurice of Nassau that which continues his most renowned, though probably not his best picture, his 'Young Bull,' for some time in the Louvre, now restored to the painter's native country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse, representation of animal life in the main figure; but Paul Potter's later pictures, especially his smaller pictures of pastures with cattle feeding, having fine colouring and fine treatment of light, are now regarded as equally good in their essential excellences, and of wider scope. Paul Potter etched as well as painted. There is no example of Paul Potter in the National Gallery.

Jan David de Heem[26] and his son Cornelius, the father born in 1603, the son in 1630, and Maria Von Oesterwyck, the elder man's pupil, were eminent Flemish and Dutch flower and fruit painters. The gorgeous bloom and mellow ripeness in some of the flower and fruit pieces of Flemish and Dutch painters, like those I have mentioned, are beyond description. I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how, as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted and less lavishly-blossoming English flowers; so these Flemish and Dutch full blown flower pieces have not a trace of the sentiment which modern flower painters cannot help seeking, with good result or bad result, to introduce into every tuft of primroses or of violets, if not into every cluster of grapes and bunch of cherries.

From a fact which I have already mentioned, that so many Flemish and Dutch pictures, which we may often come across, are in England, I am sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to other famous painters of these schools or school, for they merge into one, to Snyders, Jan Steen, Gerard Dow, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Van de Velde, etc., etc.



CHAPTER IX.

SPANISH ART—VELASQUEZ, 1599-1660—MURILLO, 1618-1682.

Spanish art, from its dawn to the time of Velasquez, had been of a 'severely devotional character,' austere and formal; and although one man did not work a revolution by his independent example, he did something to humanize and widen art. In the rich city of Seville in 1599, Diego Rodriguez, de Silva y Velasquez,—and not, as he is incorrectly called, Diego Velasquez de Silva, was born, and, according to an Andalusian fashion, took his mother's name of Velasquez, while his father was of the Portuguese house de Silva. Velasquez was gently born, though his father was in no higher position than that of a lawyer in Seville.

The painter was well educated, though, according to his English biographer (Sir W. Stirling Maxwell), 'he was still more diligent in drawing on his grammars and copybooks than in turning them to their legitimate use.' The lad's evident bent induced his father to painter. He studied in two different Spanish studios, and married the daughter of his second master, whom the talents, assiduity, and good qualities of Velasquez had already strongly attached to the young painter.

From the first, Velasquez struck out what was then a new line in Spanish art. He gave himself up to the materialistic studies, to which the Flemish and Dutch painters were prone, painting diligently 'still life' in every form, taking his living subjects from the streets and way-sides, and keeping a peasant lad as an apprentice, 'who served him for a study in different actions and postures (sometimes crying, sometimes laughing), till Velasquez had grappled with every variety of expression.' The result of those studies was Velasquez's famous picture of the 'Aguador,' or water-carrier of Seville, which was carried off by Joseph Buonaparte in his flight from Spain, taken in his carriage at Vittoria, and finally presented by Ferdinand VII, of Spain, as a grateful offering to the Duke of Wellington, in whose gallery at Apsley House the picture remains. 'It is a composition of three figures,' Sir W. Stirling Maxwell writes; 'a sunburnt way-worn seller of water, dressed in a tattered brown jerkin, with his huge earthen jars, and two lads, one of whom receives a sparkling glass of the pure element, whilst his companion quenches his thirst from a pipkin. The execution of the heads and all the details is perfect; and the ragged trader dispensing a few maravidi's worth of his simple stock, maintains, during the transaction, a grave dignity of deportment, highly Spanish and characteristic, and worthy of an emperor pledging a great vassal in Tokay.'

Just such a group may still be seen, or was to be seen till very lately, in the quaint streets of Seville. I have read an anecdote of Velasquez and this picture, which is quite probable, though I cannot vouch for its accuracy. It is said that, while painting the water-carrier day after day, when he had been engaged with his work for several hours, Velasquez found himself vexed by perceiving, as it were, the effect of a shadow cast by some of the drapery. Small flaw as it might have been, it appeared to him to interfere with and spoil the picture. Again and again, in endeavouring to do away with this 'shadow,' Velasquez undid portions of his work, and had to repeat them next day, but always, towards the end of his task, the invidious shadow stole upon his vision. At last a friend, who was present and full of admiration for the picture, heard Velasquez exclaim, 'That shadow again!' and saw him seize a brush and prepare to dash it across the canvas. The friend remonstrated, besought, and by main force held back the painter, and at last induced him to leave the picture untouched till next day, when Velasquez discovered, to his great relief, that the shadow had been in his own wearied young eyes, and not in his admirable representation of the 'Water-carrier.'

Velasquez was in Madrid in 1623, when he was in his twenty-fifth year, and having been introduced by the Prime Minister, Olivares, to the King of Spain, Philip IV., a king who was only known to smile once or twice in his lifetime, whose government was careless and blundering, but who had the reputation of being a man of some intelligence and very considerable taste,—Velasquez was received into the king's service with a monthly salary of twenty ducats, and employed to paint the royal portrait.

From the time that he became court painter, Velasquez was largely occupied in painting portraits of members of the royal family, with special repetitions of the likeness of his most Catholic Majesty. With Velasquez's first portrait of Philip in armour, mounted on an Andalusian charger, the king was so pleased, that he permitted the picture to be publicly exhibited, amidst the plaudits of the spectators, in front of the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. Nor was the exhibition a barren honour to the painter, for the king not only 'talked of collecting and in future Velasquez should have the monopoly of the royal countenance,' he paid three hundred ducats for the picture.

About this time our own Charles I., then Prince of Wales, went in his incognito of Charles Smith to Madrid on his romantic adventure of seeking to woo and win, personally, the Infanta of Spain, and Velasquez is said to have gained Charles's notice, and to have at least begun a portrait of him. If it were ever completed it has been lost, a misfortune which has caused spurious pictures, purporting to be the real work, to be offered to the public. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell holds, with great show of truth, that this visit of Charles to Madrid, when its altars were 'glowing' with the pictures of Titian, confirmed the unhappy king's taste for art.

In 1628 Rubens came to Madrid as an envoy from the governess of the Netherlands, and the two painters, who had many points in common, and who had already corresponded, became fast friends. By the advice of Rubens, Velasquez was induced to put into execution his cherished desire of visiting Italy, the king granting his favourite painter leave of absence, the continuance of his salary, and a special sum for his expenses.

Velasquez went to Venice first, and afterwards to Rome, where he was offered, and declined, a suite of apartments in the Vatican, asking only free access to the papal galleries. There he copied many portions of Michael Angelo's 'Last Judgment'—not a hundred years old, and 'yet undimmed by the morning and evening incense of centuries,' and portions of the frescoes of Raphael. At Rome Velasquez found there before him, Domenichino, Guido Reni, alternating 'between the excitements of the gaming table and the sweet creations of his smooth flowing pencil;' 'Nicolas Poussin, an adventurer fresh from his Norman village; and Claude Gelee, a pastry-cook's runaway apprentice from Lorraine.'[27] Velasquez remained a year in Rome. Besides his studies he painted three original pictures, one of them, 'Joseph's Coat,' well known among the painter's comparatively rare religious works, and now in the Escurial. In this picture his biographer acknowledges, that 'choosing rather to display his unrivalled skill in delineating vulgar forms than to risk his reputation in the pursuit of a more refined and idealized style,' Velasquez's 'Hebrew patriarchs are swineherds of Estramadura or shepherds of the Sierra Morena.'

From Rome Velasquez proceeded to Naples, where he was enabled by his prudence and forbearance to face without injury the disgraceful 'reign of terror' which the Neapolitan artists had established in the south of Italy. The Neapolitan artists more than any other Italian artists are believed to have influenced Velasquez's style.

In 1639 Velasquez painted his principal religious work, 'The Crucifixion,' for the nunnery of San Placido in Madrid, a painting in which his power has triumphed successfully over his halting imagination.

With regard to the many court groups which Velasquez was constantly taking, I may quote Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's amusing paragraph about a curious variety of human beings in the Court Gallery. 'The Alcazar of Madrid abounded with dwarfs in the days of Philip IV., who was very fond of having them about him, and collected curious specimens of the race, like other rarities. The Queen of Spain's gallery is, in consequence, rich in portraits of these little monsters, executed by Velasquez. They are, for the most part, very ugly, displaying, sometimes in an extreme degree, the deformities peculiar to their stunted growth. Maria Barbola, immortalized by a place in one of Velasquez's most celebrated pictures, was a little dame about three feet and a half in height, with the head and shoulders of a large woman, and a countenance much underjawed, and almost ferocious in expression. Her companion, Nicolasito Pertusano, although better proportioned than the lady, and of a more amicable aspect, was very inferior in elegance as a royal plaything to his contemporary, the valiant Sir Geoffrey Hudson; or his successor in the next reign, the pretty Luisillo of Queen Louisa of Orleans. Velasquez painted many portraits of these little creatures, generally seated on the ground; and there is a large picture in the Louvre representing two of them leading by a cord a great spotted hound, to which they bear the same proportion that men of the usual size bear to a horse.'

In 1648 Velasquez again visited Italy, sent by the king this time to collect works of art for the royal galleries and the academy about to be founded. Velasquez went by Genoa, Milan, Venice (buying there chiefly the works of Tintoret), and Parma, to Rome and Naples, returning to Rome. At Rome Velasquez painted his splendidly characteristic portrait of the Pope Innocent X., 'a man of coarse features and surly expression, and perhaps the ugliest of all the successors of St Peter.'

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—