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Updated: May 11, 2025
They are assuredly not New York any more than Gobelin tapestries and Fortuny pictures and Louis Seize chairs are New York." "How queerly you talk. Where is New York, then?" Oldaker sighed thoughtfully between two spoonfuls of tortue verte, claire. "Well, I suppose the truth is that there isn't much of New York left in New York.
It does not make much of an impression after the Prado. The Fortuny is not characteristic, though a rarity; a sketch for his Battle of Tetuan, the original an unfinished painting, is at Barcelona. There are special galleries such as the Sala Haes with its seventy pictures, which are depressing.
Trips had been taken to Florence, Venice and the beloved Morocco, and the poise and grace and limpid beauty of Fortuny's pictures seemed to increase. Three years had passed, and now came a letter from the authorities at Barcelona asking for their great battle picture, and a remittance was sent "to meet expenses." Fortuny promised, and made an effort at the work.
Fortuny was not much of a soldier, for war did not interest him, save from its picturesque side. "War is transient, but Beauty is eternal," he once said. Even the fact that the Spanish Army was now on the soil of her ancient enemy, the Moor, did not stir his patriotism. He sketched with feverish industry, fearing the war would end too soon, and he would have to go back with empty sketchbooks.
Thus does the “Spanish Marriage” of Fortuny outclass his “Academicians Choosing a Model,” which besides lacking the reserve force of the former has its source in flippant imagination; and so may the many other shifts of time and tide in the graphic arts be measured and chronicled upon the basis of the emotions and the formative touch of the poetic, upon the sequence of the artist’s regard for the ideal and the real, and the degree of his approach toward either.
The canvas is now hanging on the wall of the Parliament House at Barcelona, and the picture is justly the pride of the city that showed itself such a wise and loving mother to the motherless boy, Mariano Fortuny. Italy and Spain are sisters, and not merely first cousins, as Mr. Whistler once remarked. Their history to a great degree is contemporaneous.
He had said that he was tired of the "gay rags" of the eighteenth century, and his Strand of Portici shows a new line of departure. Edouard Manet made special appeal to Fortuny; Manet, who had derived from Goya, whose Spanish fond is undeniable.
They inspired me with a real disgust of my own. Ah, Fortuny, you spoil my sleep!" Standing aloof from the ideas and tendencies of his times and not a sweeper of the chords that stir in human nature the heroic or the pathetic, it is none the less uncritical to rank this Spaniard as a brainless technician.
For some weeks before he died he had been troubled with a slight fever, contracted, he thought, from painting in a damp church; but the day of his death he took up his brush again and, as he worked, gaily talked with his wife of their plans for the future. It is very pleasant to recall, however, that before death claimed him, Fortuny had completed the great picture of "The Battle of Wad Ras."
The motto of this lucky Spanish painter might have been "Fortuny Fortunatus." Even his sudden death, at the early age of thirty-six, came after he had executed a number of masterpieces, an enormous quantity of water-colours, etchings, ceramics, damascene swords and chased ornaments; it followed on the heels of sudden glory.
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