Sunshine And Shadow In Spain

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Here, indeed, we have ‘the complete expression of the Velazquez eyesight,’ and great and glorious as ‘The Surrender of Breda’ is, we are bound to confess that R A M Stevenson was right in maintaining that his historical picture is not—like ‘The Maids of Honor’—‘an absolutely unique thing in the history of art.’ Like so many of the great pictures in the world, ‘The Maids of Honor’ originated in a spontaneous and unpremeditated flash of intense vision. The story generally accepted is that Velazquez was painting the king, who sat in the spot from which the spectator is supposed to see the picture of ‘Las Meninas’. During a moment’s rest the ‘Infanta’ came in with her attendants, and the king was struck with the group which fell together before his eyes. Near him he saw the princess, her maids of honor Maria Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco (who is offering her water), her dog, and her dwarfs Mari Barbola and Nicolasito Pertusato; a little farther on the left, Velazquez, who had stepped back to look at his picture; farther back on the right, a duenna and courtier talking; while at the distant end of the gallery the king saw his queen and himself reflected in a mirror, and through the open door, Don Joseph Nieto drawing back a curtain. The canvas shown in the picture would naturally be, as Stevenson maintains, the one on which Velazquez was painting the king’s portrait. Some, however, will have it to be the very canvas of ‘Las Meninas,’ which Velazquez was painting from a reflection in a mirror placed near to where the king had been sitting. R A M Stevenson has justly pointed out that the perspective in the picture hardly seems to agree with this view, but rather makes Velazquez to have been working on the king’s right hand. It is not a matter of importance, and the story of the conception of the picture may easily have got mixed in the telling. It is just possible that Velazquez was painting, or was about to paint, a portrait of the Infanta only, when the idea of the large picture suddenly occurred to him or to the king. The canvas of ‘Las Meninas’ is made of separate pieces sewn together, and one of these just contains the Infanta, with room for accessories or a subordinate figure. However it originated, the picture was immediately recognized as a brilliant triumph, and tradition says the Red Cross of Santiago on the painter’s breast was painted there by the king’s own hand, as a promise of the honor that was to be conferred on him afterwards.

It is hard to conceive of a more beautiful piece of painting than this—so free and yet firm and so revealing. When one stands before this canvas one is not concerned with any consideration of who it was painted by; it fills the mind and suffices. Like all of the great artists, Velazquez takes something out of life and sets it free. The men and women in his finest pictures are released from what some one has called ‘mankind’s little daily cage’; and we are startled at the representation. In this portrait group we have life stated so intensely that the ordinary life around us seems almost unreal.

The same intense and startling impression of life is given us by the paintings of single figures executed by Velazquez during his last years. If we compare the shabby but dignified philosopher ‘Aesop—a fine example of his late style—with ‘Philip IV as a Sportsman’, which is admittedly one of the best full lengths of his middle period, we shall begin to realize how far Velazquez traveled during the intervening years, not merely in the rendering of form but in the painting of light and air.

In 1659 Cardinal Mazarin sealed the reconciliation between France and Spain by arranging a marriage between the young Louis XIV and Maria Teresa of Spain. The meeting of the two courts on the frontier and the organizing of the imposing ceremonies required, burdened the Marshal of the Palace with a multiplicity of work and anxiety. The wedding took place on June 7, but it was the last function Velazquez was able to perform. At sixty years of age the strain was too much for him, and a few weeks after he had returned to Madrid he collapsed and died on August 6, 1660.

In a sense if may be said that the most surprising adventures of Velazquez occurred after his death. By birth a hidalgo (i.e a member if the lesser nobility), Velazquez was buried like a grandee. The entire court attended his funeral, and knights of all orders took part in the ceremonies. But after the generation that knew the man had passed away, the glory of the painter was strangely an unaccountably forgotten. For two hundred years, during which picture lovers flocked to Italy and Italian artists became daily more famous, the name of Velazquez was seldom mentioned. Then, about fifty years ago, the sympathy of two or three great artists, notably Whistler in England and Manet in France, broke the spell of silence, and supported by a galaxy of writers, among whom was R A M Stevenson—from whose great book The Art of Velazquez we have freely quoted—these enthusiasts made the light of Velazquez to shine before all men, so that today he is and evermore will be a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of Art.

Sunshine And Shadow In Spain (continued)