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Updated: June 17, 2025
We have been called by a countryman to admire his gallery of Claudes, Poussins, Rembrandts, Murillos, and Titians, for which he had expended a princely sum, but which there was no difficulty in recognizing as the shop roba got up expressly to entrap the unwary.
"Oh, your lordship," said I, "your Guidos, and Ostades, and Poussins, and Velasquez, are not to be surpassed." "True," replied his lordship, "they are fine very fine; but you have the Murillos. I'd like to give you a good round sum," added he, "to pick out half-a-dozen pictures out of your gallery." Do you understand pictures? continued Jawleyford, turning short on his friend Sponge.
The country is inhospitable-looking, and the natives seem to have abandoned their picturesque national dress. One must now go to Mexico to see the cavalier in his gay and handsome costume. In Madrid I of course visited the splendid Armoury; also the National Art Gallery with its Velasquezs and Murillos. From Madrid to San Sebastian, the season not yet begun, and Biarritz.
"You cannot stop me, señor!" "Oh, yes, I can, señorita. Don't fancy I've followed you all the way from Mexico to be baffled so easily. The Murillos are determined men. I have resolved that you shall be mine!" "Never!" "That word is easy to speak. What have I done that you should despise me?" "You say the Murillos are determined men. They are, likewise, bloody men.
Mara was her picture-gallery, who gave her in the twenty-four hours as many Murillos or Greuzes as a lover of art could desire; and as she tied over the child's golden curls a little flat hat, and saw her go dancing off along the sea-sands, holding to Miss Roxy's bony finger, she felt she had in her what galleries of pictures could not buy.
Of Teniers, whose works are sold for fabulous sums for the square inch, this extraordinary museum possesses no less than sixty finished pictures, the Louvre considers itself rich with fourteen. So much for a few of the foreigners. Among the Spaniards the three greatest names could alone fill a gallery. There are sixty-five Velazquez, forty-six Murillos, and fifty-eight Riberas.
As for pictures by Tintoretto, showing Venetian Doges hobnobbing informally with members of the Holy Family, and Raphael's angels, and Michelangelo's lost souls, and Guidos, and Murillos, I have had enough to do me for months and months and months. Nor am I in the market for any of the dead fish of the Flemish school.
The men's convents are closed; that which contains the famous Murillos has been turned into an academy of the fine arts; but the English guide did not think the pictures were of sufficient interest to detain strangers, and so hurried us back to the shore, and grumbled at only getting three shillings at parting for his trouble and his information.
Let him not fail to go to the museum, however; he will be the poorer beyond calculation if he does not; but he will be a beggar if he does not go to the Hospital de la Caridad, where in the church he will find six Murillos out-Murilloing any others excepting always the incomparable "Vision of St. Anthony" in the cathedral.
Thus do the fine arts languish. When rich young Americans take as much interest in painting and sculpture as they do in foot-ball and yachting, we shall have our Vandycks and Murillos, if nothing better.
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