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And by and by they came to the tall old tenement-house, and climbed up the stairs to where Mariano's old "grandfather" lived. Perhaps he wasn't Mariano's sure-enough grandfather, but he was just as good as if he had been. But now it was an awfully long time ago since little Mariano and Father Gonzales had first climbed the stairs to where Grandfather Fortuny lived.
Fortuny is said to "split the light into a thousand particles, till his pictures sparkle like jewels and are as brilliant as a kaleidoscope.... He set the fashion for a class of pictures, filled with silks and satins, bric-a-brac and elegant trifling." Look at the brilliant scene in this picture! The priest rising from his chair and leaning over the table is watching the bridegroom sign his name.
And so Mariano started gaily away, carrying with him the heart's love of two old men, and the admiring affection of a whole school. The grandfather died three months afterward went babbling down into the Valley, making prophecies to the last to the effect that Mariano Fortuny would yet win deathless fame. And Father Gonzales lived to see these prophecies fulfilled.
How could the old professors down at Barcelona understand that this mere youth was pressed with commissions from rich Americans, and in receipt of a princely income? Fortuny returned all the money that Barcelona had sent him, regarding it all as a mere loan, and promised to complete the battle picture whenever he could bring his mind to bear upon it so that the work would satisfy himself.
If you have seen Vernet's painting you can never forget it, and if there were nothing else to see at Versailles but this one picture you would be repaid, and amply repaid, for going out from Paris to view it. Before beginning his great canvas Fortuny was advised to go to Versailles and see the Vernet masterpiece. He went and spent three days studying it in detail. He turned away discouraged.
Fortuny has personal charm, a quality usually missing nowadays, for painters in their desire to be truthful are tumbling head over heels into the prosaic. Individuality is vanishing in the wastes of an over-anxious realism. If Fortuny is a daring virtuoso on one or two strings, his palette is ever enchanting.
On the green slope behind the castle, while the outline of the tropical vegetation is only stealing into view, there is hid, and yet visible, a long, low building of yellow columns, blue facade, brown gables and red tiles: if you shut out the rest of the landscape with your hands, you would say it was a picture by Fortuny.
One of them, Raimonde Madrazo, is well known in Paris, and, in Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, had several pictures on exhibition at the Chicago Exposition; while another son, Rivera, is a noted sculptor and a painter of no small repute. And so it was that Mariano Fortuny at Barcelona attracted the attention of Federico Madrazo, the artist patrician.
It is a picture in five horizontal strips, and is introduced for the warning it contains in its treatment of a group which is in itself a line. The well-known “Spanish Marriage” by Fortuny also shows the reserve group, but the contrast is more positive both in repose and color. The main and more distant group is well centralized and there is a clever diminuendo expressed in its characters.
He was admired, imitated, above all parodied; though, jealously as are his pictures guarded, he has been put on the shelf like one of the amazing painted bibelots in his work. The injustice of this is patent. Between Fortuny and Meissonier there lies the gulf that separates the genius and the hard-working man of talent.
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