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It was getting on towards noon: the sun was high and hot, and the birds had mostly retired into the deepest shades for their mid-day sleep. I could have lingered all day, but it was time for me to return, as I had arranged with Velasquez to accompany him in search of some Indian graves he had heard of about three miles away.
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. 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.
The Spanish gallery contains many fine specimens of the works of the Spanish masters, Velasquez, Murillo, and others. The Standish Collection is so called, because it was given to Louis Phillippe in 1838, by an Englishman by the name of Standish. It includes many first-class paintings, and a bible once owned by Cardinal Ximenes, now valued at twenty-five thousand francs.
This conviction remained with him during his lifetime. It was not until 1511 that the Spaniards commenced to colonize the island, when Diego Columbus, then Governor of San Domingo, sent an expedition of three hundred men for the purpose, under the command of Diego Velasquez, whose landing was disputed by the natives.
In a consultation respecting our intended expedition to Mexico, Cortes was advised by his friends to destroy the fleet, in order to prevent all possibility of the adherents of Velasquez deserting to Cuba, and likewise to procure a considerable augmentation to our force, as there were above an hundred sailors.
In Madrid, Velasquez numbered several noble ladies among his pupils; but no detailed accounts of the works of these artists is available if any such exist and their pictures are in private collections.
Velasquez being out of the question, why not Van Dyck! An excellent idea! Especially when instead of dwarfs, buffoons, and idiots, the English Court contained some exceedingly fine material besides the royal family for the artist to exercise his talent upon.
It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly, were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait.
In the Hall of Velásquez the thin, bony, fair-haired kings, of monastic grace and anæmic pallor, with their protruding under-jaws, and in their eyes an expression of doubt and fear for the salvation of their souls.
Señor Beruete believes her to represent the daughter of the painter Mazo and his wife, Francisca Velasquez, therefore a granddaughter of Velasquez. The tonalities of this picture are subtly beautiful, the modelling mysterious, the expression vital and singularly child-like.
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