WE had come ostensibly to Madrid to see the works of Velasquez, and we carried out our intention, not glancing at, but really looking into and studying them as we study Homer, or Shakespeare, or Cervantes. The journey from London to Madrid is costly and fatiguing; but I advise any one to make it who is desirous of receiving a good lesson in art. I own that no one has taught me such a lesson on the largeness of it, the perfectibility of it, the ease of it. Velasquez’ work is simple creation, and that is the truth of it. Where will you find work like it? He was no poet like Murillo or Raphael. He sucked in no golden atmosphere that saints and seraphs breathe; he heard no music of the upper spheres, but he lived among ordinary men and women, and portrayed them, flesh and spirit, without an extravagance, without an idealism, without the hairbreadth of a deviation from the truth. Thus it happens that when you come away from his pictures, you forget the painter and the painting, and you remember only the subjects,—not elevated subjects, often quite the contrary, but Æsthetically conceived by an intellect so unswerving, and touched with a hand so masterly, that they seem to “live, and move, and have their being.”

As has been truly said, “He drew the minds of men; they live, breathe, and seem ready to walk out of their frames. The dead come forth conjured up; we behold what written history cannot give—their actual semblance in life. His power of painting circumambient air, his knowledge of lineal and aËrial perspective, the gradation of tones in light, and shadow, and colour, give an absolute concavity to the flat surface of his canvas; we look into space, into a room, into the reflexion of a mirror.” And elsewhere, “Aucun maÎtre ne saisit comme lui un personnage pour le faire vivre, agir, respirer devant vous. En mÊme temps, quelle tournure il lui donne! Comme il a le secret de cette fleur d’insolence et de ces belles rodomontades, dont À nos yeux l’hidalgo Castilien est le type!”

I suppose most people would prefer Murillo to Velasquez, because imagination is generally set on a pedestal above intellect. Murillo’s imagination is like an upsoaring fountain, ever sunny and ever luminous, whilst Velasquez did not dream, but reason. He is, indeed, the most logical of painters; and what makes his works so valuable to artists and lovers of art is the quality they have in common with the masterpieces of antiquity, and which has been well called the perfection of good sense. As a French author has said, “Velasquez Écrit en prose, mais, pour le portrait, du moins, il est le premier des prosateurs.”

The Museo of Madrid contains more than sixty pictures of this great master,—the Voltaire of art, who tried his hand at everything and succeeded in everything,—portraits, landscapes, historic subjects, animals, interiors, flowers, fruit. There is nothing he left untried excepting the marine. It is quite astounding with what nobility he treated ignoble subjects, such as dwarfs, beggars, dull Infantas, and kings with “the foolish hanging of the nether lip,” painting all to the life; for though Velasquez was a courtier and a court-painter, he never flattered his royal patrons one iota. He treated ignoble subjects nobly, that is, faithfully, seeing and respecting in dwarfs, beggars, and foolish Infantas and kings, the same humanity that he saw in such lofty, stately Spaniards as he has elsewhere given.

Study one of Velasquez’ greatest pictures as a whole, as a creation in fact, and then set yourself to look into the manner of it, how much remains still to marvel at and admire. Moratin said, “Velasquez knew how to paint the air;” and nothing is more striking in his pictures than this clear, palpable, sunny atmosphere; one seems to breathe in it, and not in that of the galleries.

But when you have made this discovery, you will make others no less striking. Take, for instance, his colouring. Perhaps no painter ever employed fewer colours than he; he is as sparing of bright tints as a classic writer in the use of similes, yet his pictures glow with life and are perfect miracles of harmony and truth to nature. His painting has been well compared to a stately gentleman who maintains in his conduct, his actions and his words, a perfect and dignified equilibrium, and who avoids loud laughter or talking, or anything that might disturb the general harmony of his bearing and appearance.

His work, indeed, resembles his life, which was courtly, dignified, and complete. Though a courtier, he kept intact his pure manners and morals, his kindly nature, and his passionate love of art. All that is known of him redounds to his honour, from the period of his early youth, when he worked in the studio of Pacheco, and by his fine qualities of heart and brain won his master’s affection and the hand of his master’s daughter, to the fatal journey to Irun in 1660, where he brought on his death by overworking himself in preparing the ‘Ile de Faisans’ for the Infanta’s marriage. Of all noble Spaniards, hardly Cervantes seems to have been nobler than he.

It were worth any one’s while to make the journey to Madrid, if only to see his Borrachos; and there is a good story about our English Wilkie, who came to Madrid for the purpose of studying Velasquez, and went away having studied this one masterpiece only.

Wilkie used to visit the gallery every day, no matter what the weather might be, and to establish himself in a chair opposite this picture. After having contemplated it fixedly for three hours in silent ecstasy, he would utter a long and profound “ouf,” seize his hat, and rush away.

Hanging close (if I remember rightly) to the wonderful “Las Meninias,” is a religious picture, which every one should look at, for never had picture a stranger and more touching history.

Don Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velasquez, the rich courtier, the familiar friend of the king, and the renowned artist, had a mulatto slave named Juan Pareja. It was Pareja’s office to mix the colours, to prepare the canvas, to clean the brushes, to arrange the palettes; and these occupations kept him perpetually in his master’s studio. He felt himself to be a born painter all the time that he exercised these humble duties, he watched his master at work, he listened to the instruction he gave his pupils, he spent his nights in making sketches and copies secretly. At last, when he was forty-five years old, he thought himself sufficiently accomplished in his art to make his secret known. Accordingly, one day he placed a small picture of his own, with its face turned to the wall, among his master’s; and when the king came to the studio, as he often did, brought it forward. “That’s a beautiful picture,” said Philip; “whose work is it?” Upon which Pareja threw himself on his knees and avowed that it was his own. Velasquez freed him from slavery by a public act, and received him, from that day, among his pupils and equals. But poor Pareja was so used to service and so devoted to his master, that he would fain have served him as a freedman; and after the great painter’s death continued so to serve his daughter.

From Velasquez, who lived in an age when Spain was great, and interpreted the spirit of it with the faithfulness of photography, and an introspective power quite Shakspearian, one naturally turns to his friend and pupil, the divine Murillo.

At first sight, the blazing sun of Velasquez’ genius would seem to obscure and dwarf the paler orb of Murillo’s. It is like passing from Cervantes to Calderon; and if the one paints men and manners with inimitable force and humours, the other takes us straight up to heaven, where we abide with saints and angels.

It is curious that the distinctive recognition of Murillo as a great religious painter should not yet have generally taken place in England. People who do not travel and read Mr. Ruskin’s criticisms, think of Murillo only or chiefly as a painter of dirty and vicious humanity, such as beggar boys and the like. Yet how unlike is such an impression, and how easy it is to know what Murillo really has done, even without going to Spain! There is one picture alone, in the possession of Mr. Tomline,[4] of Orwell Park, Ipswich, which tells you more about Murillo than anything English critics ever wrote. I did not see this picture till after I returned from Spain, though I had endeavoured to do so (having ridden eighteen miles for the purpose), but other travellers will be wise to see everything they can, not only of Murillo, but of Velasquez and other Spanish masters, before starting for tawny Spain. Some of Murillo’s finest pictures are at Seville, but as the Gallery of Madrid contains forty-five of his works, it is not necessary to go to Seville to see what this man of such rare gifts could do.

Murillo’s life was very different to that of Velasquez; and if his works are unequal,—some being inferior both in conception and finish—it must be remembered that he was no favoured friend of royalty, working at his leisure, and never hurried into laboured or crude execution by the necessity of money. Murillo painted for the public and for his bread; and whilst some of his works are glorious achievements of fancy and skill, fullblown blossoms of beauty that have ripened in the sun, others have evidently been too hastily conceived and matured. A French author, who has written discriminately about Murillo, draws an admirable distinction between his works and those of Velasquez, Titian, or Da Vinci, when he says that a chef d’oeuvre of Murillo is only a chef d’oeuvre relatively, and by comparison, whilst a chef d’oeuvre of the latter painter’s is a chef d’oeuvre absolute, defying all comparison whatever. He says, and very truly, that the possessor of one canvas of Murillo, were it the most beautiful of all, would have but a very incomplete idea of this painter, whilst a single masterpiece of Raphael or Titian suffices to attest their genius to the full.[5]

But setting aside criticisms and comparisons, what a legacy of beauty has Murillo left the world! With what deep religious fervour and poetic feeling he has embodied all that was most divine in the Catholic religion! There is not a phase of heavenly contemplation, or fervid ecstasy, that he has not made incarnate and immortal in enchanted colours; and if you contemplate his pictures for awhile, you seem to drop your fleshly garments and float in golden ether with rapt virgins and smiling cherubs. His colour has well been called ravishing; it is something impossible to describe, and as much the soul of the picture as essence is the soul of the flower.

This colouring is so delicious that it is no less of a vision to seeing eyes than miraculous healing would be to the blind man. I ought, perhaps, to say to Northern eyes, since Murillo’s atmospheres are hardly less luminous and lovely than those of his native Andalusia. He painted Andalusian beauty too, like Velasquez preferring to portray real to ideal human nature, though, unlike Velasquez, he contented himself with loveliness only. “One might say,” says M. Viardot, “that Velasquez is the painter of earth, and Murillo the painter of heaven.” He should have added,—of heaven as peopled by the believing Catholic with beautiful beneficent Christs, with archangels, angels, seraphs, with the noble army of martyrs, with Virgins ever fair and ever young, with crowned saints, and heavenly hosts shining resplendent round celestial thrones.

To understand a great religious painter like Murillo, one must have some sympathy with the age in which he lived, and the public which was his patron. He was eminently the painter of the people, from the time of his unlettered and humble boyhood, when he sold little pictures of Virgins and Christs at a few rials the dozen in the streets of Seville, to the last years of his long, independent, prosperous, honoured life. It must be remembered that the Inquisition kept a strict surveillance on artists, their works and their patrons; and that Velasquez is almost an exception in his divergence from the only fair field open to all, an exception impossible perhaps except to a royal favourite. Murillo’s more plastic genius accommodated itself to the circumstances surrounding it, and the result is, these marvels of colour and celestial expression, that realize the spirit of the time at once.

Whilst Velasquez may be said to have embodied in his works the aristocratic spirit of the most aristocratic age of Spain, and Murillo the purely devotional, Zurbaran may be called the painter of the ascetic, and Ribera, better known as Spagnoletto, of the Inquisitorial. Amateurs will not, I think, care much for Ribera’s pictures, except in so far as they show the cruel side of the same religion that in Murillo’s hands was so sweet and lovely. Ribera, or, as he has been called, “this cruel forcible imitator of ordinary ill-selected nature,” may be well studied at Madrid. Here you have every form and fashion of suffering and repulsive humanity, such, as Ford said, could be conceived by a bull-fighter, and please a people whose sports are blood and torture; and if for the sake of the powerful in drawing, and the wonderful mastery of light and shadow, you can contemplate those terrible subjects one after the other, you will have more powers of endurance and more passion for art than the present writer. This Spanish Caravaggio, who obtained his name of lo Spagnoletto, the little Spaniard, when he was a begging student in the streets of Rome, lived so much in Italy, and had such a passion for the great Italian masters, Correggio and Caravaggio, whom he studied, that, except in Madrid, one hardly thinks of him as a Spaniard at all. His busy and afterwards prosperous life was mostly spent at Naples, then a province of Spain, though the greater part of his pictures have been recovered by his native country; but it was not a life to look into so fearlessly as that of Velasquez or Murillo, and one gladly turns alike from the master and his work to others less painful.

Zurbaran has left no story. Like so many of the greatest Spanish painters, he arose from the humblest ranks, and that is almost all one knows of him. But he was a very great artist, and his pictures have the same historic interest as those of Murillo, portraying, as they do, a distinct phase of Catholic Spain. Indeed, a French critic has gone so far as to say that if by a miracle the remembrance of Spain were effaced from the universal human mind; and if we were ignorant of her moral and religious history, such pictures as these of Murillo, Zurbaran, Ribera, and Herrera, would lose half their worth. It is quite certain that Zurbaran’s pictures do owe much of their interest to the ascetic element prevailing in them, however far we may be from accepting the above conclusion. He saw a monk, and painted a monk introspectively, as no one else could do; and every one will do well to study his pictures, the finest of which are at Seville, and very few of which are at Madrid. They portray the austere element of the same religion which Murillo made so enticing with visions of light, loveliness, and colour. These three masters, Murillo, Ribera, and Zurbaran, may be said to express and eliminate the three vital principles of Romanism, such as men like Loyola and women like St. Theresa had made it, namely, ecstatic vision, torture, and asceticism. It seems as if in Spain the Trinity must stand or fall together.

The schools of Spanish art are generally divided into three, the Castilian, the Valencian, and the Sevillian; properly speaking, the kingdom of Aragon possessed another, though little known. Gallegos, who introduced the style of Van Eyck and Albert DÜrer; MoralÈs, whose Ecce Homos and Madonna Dolorosas are scattered all over Spain; El Mudo, the dumb, who brought from Italy something of the rich Venetian colouring; El Greco, who was at once an architect, a sculptor, and a painter, “truly Spanish, unequal and eccentric,” and whose “streaky lights,” as Mr. Stirling says, “are sharper than Toledo blades;”—may be said to represent the school of Castile; whilst that of Valencia, the most effeminate and superstitious province of Spain, is represented by Ribaeta, the disciple of L. Carracci and Domenichino, and Ribera, Orrente, the Bassano of Spain. Then we come to Seville, the capital of sunny, many-gifted Andalusia. The school of Seville boasts of other honourable names before we come to its greatest—Velasquez, Murillo, and Zurbaran. There was Herrera, the first master of Velasquez; Pacheco, his second master and afterwards father-in-law, not only a painter of some pretensions, but a learned writer on art,—“coldly correct and classically dull in whatever he did,” says a critic; but let that pass. There was Pablo de Cespedes, also famous for achievements of pen and pencil; Juan de las Ruelas, the worthy pupil of Correggio and Giorgione, whose pictures are only to be seen in Andalusia. Alonzo Cano, alike architect, sculptor, and painter, whose passion for art was so strong, that on his dying bed he impatiently put a crucifix from his lips because it was badly carved.

What a splendid muster-roll is this! Who will not be tempted to come and judge for himself? The works of many of these artists, however, are only to be seen in the churches and convents of their native provinces, where they remain “hanging like golden oranges on their native boughs.”

But before leaving Madrid, you must give a little time—not too much, since it is so precious—among “these acres of canvas,” to the fantastic and not pleasing pictures of Goya, the last Spanish painter of any note, who died in 1828, at the age of eighty-six. Goya has been compared to Hogarth for his quality of humour; to Callot, for imagination; to Rembrandt, for vigour of execution, elsewhere to Velasquez and to Reynolds; but his pictures are so characterised by a sort of Hoffman-like revelling in the weird and the impossible, that it is difficult to understand and like them. Like Ribera he bids you sup on horrors.

And after this survey of all the Spanish painters, how much remains yet to see! Here are grand pictures of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, of Michel-Angelo, Andrea del Sarto, of Domenichino,—indeed, of all the Italian, Flemish, and French masters, and amongst so much to see, the only fear is of seeing nothing.

Our principal object in coming to Madrid was Velasquez, who is to be studied nowhere else, and we therefore saw many other pictures imperfectly. Other travellers may be less circumscribed as to time, and fortunate are they who, having leisure, can support the rarefied air of Madrid long enough to do justice to the greatest picture-gallery in the world. It is not only the greatest but the best-arranged, the quietest and the most comfortable. You leave your carriage at the door and stroll in for an hour or so. All is quiet, and silent, and orderly as in a church; the rooms are unadorned and perfectly lighted; the pictures are never hidden by crowds of copyists; the place is never crowded or noisy; and after contemplating your favourite pictures or picture for a time, you leave the gallery, not tired and blinded by too many impressions, but refreshed and invigorated with a calm intellectual enjoyment that is as good and simple as it is deep and lasting.