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It is the little son of Philip IV., Don Balthazar Carlos, whose portrait is before us as manly and sturdy looking a little fellow as ever bestrode a pony. He was but six years old when Velasquez painted the picture here reproduced. Certainly he was not fettered and cramped and prevented from taking exercise like his little sisters.
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.
We went accordingly to Cuba, where we were kindly received by Velasquez, who promised to give us the first lands that fell vacant; but, after waiting three years, reckoning from the time of leaving Spain, and no settlements offering, an hundred and ten of us chose Francisco Hernandez de Cordova for our captain, a wealthy gentleman of Cuba, and determined to go on a voyage of discovery under his command.
The ladies themselves liked to look like nymphs, characterless and pretty, so the fashion of painting portraits in this way became common. The pictures are pleasing to look at, although so artificial, and after all it was only full-length portraits of ladies that Reynolds treated in this way. They were a small part of his whole output. But he and Velasquez worked in a totally different spirit.
No one seemed to be certain what to call him, but he generally wrote his name "Diego de Silva Velasquez." His father was Rodriguez de Silva, a lawyer, but in calling the boy Velasquez the family followed a universal Spanish custom of naming children after their mothers.
After listening to the defence of his friend, Philip immediately made answer: 'I can believe all you say of the excellent disposition of Diego Velasquez. Having lived for half his life in courts, he was yet capable both of gratitude and generosity, and in the misfortunes, he could remember the early kindness of Olivares.
There, says Palomino, he spent nine years in close application to study, and there, he probably enjoyed the advantage of seeing Velasquez, during that great artist's second visit to Naples. When Giordano was about seventeen years old, having learned from Ribera all he could teach him, he conceived a strong desire to prosecute his studies at Rome.
We finished our homely breakfast and set off again, crossing some more rocky ranges, and passing several Indian huts with orange trees growing around them, and at two o'clock in the afternoon reached the small town of Comoapa, where I determined to wait for Velasquez.
But in this case the mother had her way, or, more properly, she let the boy have his as mothers do and the sequel shows that a woman's heart is sometimes nearer right than a man's head. The fact that "Velasquez" was the maiden name of his mother, and was adopted by the young man, is a straw that tells which way the vane of his affections turned. Diego was sixteen and troublesome.
You look in vain for the chain historic that holds together disparate styles; there are omissions, ominous gaps, and the very nation that ought to put its best foot foremost, the Spanish, does not, with the exception of Velasquez. Of him there are over sixty authentic works; of Titian over thirty. Bryan only allows him twenty-three; this is an error.
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