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Updated: April 16, 2025
There was a quiet stateliness in his bearing, a simple and unaffected dignity, to which the thick, blue-black hair, the foreign beard, and the aquiline features lent an added touch of distinction. One was reminded of those dangerously mild and rather sad faces of Spanish soldiers which look at one from Velasquez's canvases.
"At what period of Velasquez's career?" he asked, vacantly. "When he was young and the subject was middle-aged, a Northerner, with fair hair and lean muscles under a skin bronzed by the tropics, and the unquenchable fire of youth in his eyes." "That ought to be a good Velasquez," said the Doge. At the bottom step of the flight up to the entrance to the house he hesitated.
Thus it is that we come to have certain great pictures from Velasquez's brush which could not otherwise have been painted. This action of the king, setting free the artist, made two schools of art, of which the court painter represented one; and Murillo the other, under the command of the Church.
They are, for the most part, very ugly, displaying, sometimes in an extreme degree, the deformities peculiar to their stunted growth. Maria Barbola, immortalized by a place in one of Velasquez's most celebrated pictures, was a little dame about three feet and a half in height, with the head and shoulders of a large woman, and a countenance much underjawed, and almost ferocious in expression.
At this hour of writing I feel that I am stocked up with enough of Bouguereau's sorrel ladies and Titian's chestnut ones and Rubens' bay ones and Velasquez's pintos to last me, at a conservative estimate, for about seventy-five years. I am too young as a theatergoer to recall much about Lydia Thompson's Blondes, but I have seen sufficient of Botticelli's to do me amply well for a spell.
I shall borrow still further from Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's graphic and entertaining book, descriptions of two of Velasquez's genre pictures, 'The Maids of Honour, and the more celebrated 'Spinners, both at Madrid.
Gather into a single room a fragment of the Parthenon frieze, Michelangelo's "Day and Night," Botticelli's "Spring," the sprites and children of Donatello and Delia Robbia, Velasquez's "Pope Innocent," Rembrandt's "Cloth-weavers," Frans Hals' "Musician," Millet's "Sower," Whistler's "Carlyle." There is here no thought of period or of school.
Sir W. Stirling Maxwell asserts of Velasquez's portrait painting, that no artist 'ever followed nature with more catholic fidelity; his cavaliers are as natural as his boors; he neither refined the vulgar, nor vulgarized the refined, and goes on to quote this among other criticism: 'his portraits baffle description and praise; he drew the minds of men; they live, breathe, and are ready to walk out of the frames. Sir William winds up with the enthusiastic declaration, 'Such pictures as these are real history; we know the persons of Philip IV, and Olivares, as familiarly as if we had paced the avenues of the Pardo with Digby and Howell, and perhaps we think more favourably of their characters.
As if it much mattered. Velasquez's son-in-law, by the way, Juan Mazo, was the author of a number of imitations and forgeries. He was a true friend of the picture-dealers. Velasquez belonged to that rare family of sane genius. He was eminently the painter of daylight and not a nocturnal visionary, as was Rembrandt. Shakespeare, who had all the strings to his lyre, had also many daylight moments.
It is one of the best Lely's I ever saw, and to me the gem of Tilghman's collection." "Yes; so Ollie tells me," continued Margaret. "Now this picture of the Countess is to me very much more in Velasquez's method than in Lely's. Broader and stronger and with a surer touch. I have always told Ollie he was right to give up landscapes. These two pictures show it. There is really, Mr.
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