THOUGH numerically by no means imposing, the Spanish pictures at the Louvre form an exceedingly interesting section of the great French national collection, comprising, as they do, characteristic examples of the art of practically all the most prominent figures in the evolution of Spanish painting. Compared with the schools of Italy and Flanders, that of Spain was tardy in its development and very much dependent upon foreign influences. The activity of Flemish and Italian masters in Spain—we need only mention Starnina, Dello Delli, Rubens, Luca Giordano—and the visits of several eminent Spanish masters to Italy, could not fail to leave their clear mark on the art of the Peninsula, the renaissance of which was almost entirely due to the stimulus received from abroad. The short visit of Jan van Eyck to Portugal in 1429 also had a profound influence on the art of the Peninsula. But the local conditions, the strict rule of the Church and the tyranny of the Inquisition, the stiff ceremonial of the Court,—the only rival of the Church in the patronage of the arts,—and especially the sombre, passionate character of the Spanish race,—all helped to transform the imported styles into an art of definite national stamp, an art that is marked by sombreness, asceticism, dramatic intensity, and deep religious feeling. Throughout it is dominated by realistic tendencies and rude strength rather than by the striving for grace and beauty and rhythm which characterise Italian art. LUIS DE DALMAUThe Louvre is fortunate in possessing an authentic and extremely important, though badly restored, altarpiece by Ludovico LUIS MORALESWe need not here pay attention to the few unimportant pictures by unknown early Spanish masters in the collection, and may pass on to Luis Morales, called “El Divino” (“The Divine”) (1509–1586), who was born at Badajoz, and worked at Toledo, when the whole Spanish school was already addicted to the Italian mannerisms introduced by Berreguete and other native artists trained in Rome. Morales, however, remained faithful to the tradition of his own country, and was essentially a painter of those religious subjects which enabled him to follow the national EL GRECOWe now come to one of the most interesting figures in the history of Spanish painting—Dominico Theotocopuli, better known as “El Greco” (1548–1614), from the country of his birth. Born in Crete about 1548, El Greco entered at a very early age the studio of Titian in Venice. This at least we know from a letter written by Clovio from Rome in 1570, without which, if we were to judge from the master’s early style, we should be forced to the conclusion that he acquired his art from Tintoretto, and more particularly from Jacopo da Ponte, to whom several of his earliest works in private collections were formerly, and in some cases are still, ascribed. He went to Rome in 1570, and after five or six years took up his abode at Toledo, his first dated picture in that city, the scene of his chief activity, bearing the date 1577. Between that year and his death in 1614, his extant works illustrate the gradual evolution of his art, the change of his Italian into a typically Spanish manner, the rapid acquisition of a very personal style, and the straining of that personal style to extreme mannerism. The notes and flashes of rare, cold, almost acid, but always harmonious, colour lend a peculiar distinction to El Greco’s work. His predilection for long, narrow faces and slender, emaciated bodies led him in his declining years to El Greco’s conception of portraiture enters largely into his pictures at the Louvre, from which we must exclude as an imitation by an inferior hand the St. Francis and a Novice (No. 1729a). It is certainly an important feature in the large Christ on the Cross, with Two Donors, one of the comparatively recent acquisitions, which still hangs on a screen in Gallery XV. This great altarpiece has little of the master’s fierce passion and lightning flashes of colour. The expression of the two Donors, Diego and Antonio Covarrubias, who are seen to the waist at the foot of the Cross, does not go beyond normal pious devotion; and the Saviour seems rather to stand with spread arms than to hang on the Cross with all the weight of His characteristically elongated body. A leaden grey dominates the whole colour scheme. The composition is singularly empty and simple for a master who seemed to have a perfect horror of empty spaces. The picture, which is fully signed, must have been painted soon after El Greco’s arrival at Toledo (and not, as SÑr. CossÍo thinks, between 1590 and 1600), since one of the Donors, the priest Diego Covarrubias, died in 1577. Comparison of the two Donors’ faces with their portraits by the same master in the Toledo Library can leave no doubt as to their identity. The Christ on the Cross was offered by the deputy Isaac Pereire of Prades (PyrenÉes-Orientales) to the local parish church, but was refused and hung in the Palais de Justice at Prades, whence it was removed to the Mairie in 1904, and finally sold to the Louvre in 1908 for £1000. The picture measures 8 ft. 8 in. by 5 ft. 8 in. The St. Louis of France and a Page (No. 1729b), which was formerly wrongly catalogued as King Ferdinand the Catholic, is a more typical example of El Greco’s management of colour. The boldly painted armour is identical with that of the St. Martin on horseback, at Toledo. The probable date of the picture, which was bought in 1904 at the high price of £2800, is between 1594 and 1600. By El Greco’s favourite pupil and assistant, Luis Tristan (1586–1640), is the realistic half-figure of St. Francis of Assisi (No. 1730). A more scientific classification of the works by the Toledo painters has reversed Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell’s judgment that Tristan had all the virtues and none of the faults of his master. He was in reality a mediocre imitator of El Greco, without a spark of his master’s genius and without any of his distinction. THE SCHOOL OF SEVILLEThe naturalistic tendencies inherent in the national Spanish genius, which even in the period of Italian mannerism were not to be entirely denied, bore full fruit at Seville, where Francisco Herrera “the Old” (1576–1656) was the first entirely to reject the tyranny of the Italian manner, and with it to a certain extent the tyranny of Church patronage. He was a man of fiery character, with whom the technique of his art became a veritable passion. It was left to a painter of a later century and of another race to proclaim that it does not matter what you paint, but how you paint; but Herrera’s work at times almost suggests that he was guided by similar principles, although an instinctive sense of pictorial fitness saved him from the consequences to which their unrestricted application might easily lead. In spite of the repelling fierceness, the fanaticism, the cruelty of every single face—all of them portraits, no doubt—in the St. Basil ZURBARÁNConsiderable though it be, Herrera’s artistic achievement does not constitute his chief claim to fame; for his name will ever be best known as that of the first master of the greatest of all Spanish painters, Don Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez. But before discussing the pictures by, or catalogued under the name of, Velazquez at the Louvre, we must consider the work of two other painters of the Naturalistic school: Francisco de ZurbarÁn (1598–1661) and JosÉ de Ribera, called “Lo Spagnoletto” (1588–1656). ZurbarÁn, a pupil of the Sevillan Juan de las Roelas, was essentially a painter of church pictures, his favourite subjects being types of monks and scenes of monkish life. There is something so sincere and convincing in his unrelenting realism, that even his pictures of rapturous ecstasy and strongly emphasised emotion impress one as truthful renderings of types observed by the artist in the streets and churches of monastic Seville. The sombre passion with which his subjects are instinct is reflected by his colour and masterly chiaroscuro. ZurbarÁn became Court Painter to Philip iv. in or before 1633, in which year he added the words “Pintor del Rey” to Two admirable pictures from his brush figure in the Louvre Catalogue as St. Peter Nolasque and St. Raymond de PeÑafort (No. 1738) and The Funeral of a Bishop (No. 1739). As a matter of fact they represent two scenes from the life of St. Bonaventura: The Saint presiding at a Chapter of Minor Brothers, and The Funeral of St Bonaventura. The second of these companion pictures which were originally in a convent at Seville is particularly striking for the unconventionality of its composition, the strong character of the heads, and the masterly treatment of the chiaroscuro. Note again the placing of the heads almost in a horizontal line right across the canvas, and the anxious avoidance of empty spaces. The third picture that stands to ZurbarÁn’s name is the figure of A Lady of Fashion in the Character of St. Apollonia (No. 1740), a work of not very striking merit. RIBERARibera, though born near Valencia, where he received his early education in the painter’s art in the studio of Ribalta, was still young in years when he left his native land for Italy, never to return. Studying and working at Rome, Parma, and Naples, he was so strongly influenced by Caravaggio, and to a minor extent by Correggio, that, taking also into account his long domicile, there is some justification for those who treat him as belonging to the Italian school of Naturalists. The most prominent feature of his art is the violent and abrupt contrasting of brilliant lights with very deep and heavy shadows, which enforces the almost cruel dramatic intensity of his scenes of torture, convulsions, and suffering. In this use of chiaroscuro he was a true follower of Caravaggio, but Nowhere are his racial characteristics more pronounced than in the admirable character-study, in the La Caze Room, of a grinning beggar-boy who suffers from an infirmity from which the picture derives its popular name, The Club-foot (No. 1725). The boy is standing in bold silhouette against a clouded sky. He shoulders his crutch like a gun, and carries in his left hand a sheet of paper with the inscription—da mihi elemosinam propter amorem dei. If The Club-foot is scarcely typical of the qualities that are generally associated with Ribera’s art, the Louvre owns two thoroughly characteristic examples of his more violent manner, of his dramatic use of sharply contrasted light and shade, in The Entombment (No. 1722) and St. Paul the Hermit (No. 1723), which bears on a stone the signature JUSEPE DE RIBERA ESPAGNOL P.F. In The Entombment the master-hand is revealed by the superb breadth with which the limp yet weighty body of the Saviour is painted. It is not modelled in all its plastic roundness, but cut into sharp flat passages of light and shadow, the plastic relief being suggested by the perfection of the anatomical drawing and foreshortening. Poignant grief is expressed in the faces of St. Joseph of ArimathÆa, the Virgin Mary, St. John, and Nicodemus, who surround the body, the head of which is supported by St. Joseph. The same subject is treated with less masterly authority in The Entombment (No. 1725a), which can only be accepted as a school picture. The ascetic fervour tinged with a sense almost of cruel pleasure in self-inflicted suffering, with which Ribera loved to invest his semi-nude figures of emaciated saints, hermits, and martyrs, will be found in the St. Paul the Hermit. The picture was bought in 1875 for £252. Without loss of realistic power, and without affectation or conscious striving for prettiness, Ribera shows more human tenderness and gentle emotion in The Adoration of the Shepherds (No. 1721), a picture signed and dated on a stone in the right-hand corner, Juse Ribera espaÑol Academico romano, F. 1650. In accordance with the nature of the subject he has here refrained from making use of abrupt light and shade, the whole scene being enveloped in a warm glow. The types are not idealised, but are apparently faithful portraits of their respective models. Very similar to the central group in this canvas, but more sonorous in its depth of colour, from which gleam forth the strong lights, is the Virgin and Child (No. 1724) in the La Caze Room. The four pictures of Philosophers (Nos. 1726–1729), likewise in the La Caze Bequest, which the official Catalogue gives to Ribera, are certainly not by that master. It has been suggested that they may be the work of Ribera’s facile and versatile pupil, Luca Giordano (“Fa Presto”), but the poor quality of these paintings scarcely justifies even this attribution. They were formerly in the collection of General Mazzavedo. Ribera had a romantic career, rising as he did from absolute penury to almost despotic power as a member of a triumvirate that would brook no competition in Naples and would shrink from no means to further their schemes. Nothing is known as to how he died. He disappeared in 1656, and probably found his death in the depths of the sea. VELAZQUEZThe Catalogue of the Louvre collection contains an imposing list of seven works by the king of Spanish painters. Critical examination of these pictures will, however, result in the elimination From his studio he passed into that of the cultured and erudite Francisco Pacheco, whose artistic achievement at its best was far in advance of his professed academic principles. Summoned to Madrid in 1623 by the powerful Count Duke of Olivarez, Velazquez entered the service of King Philip iv. Velazquez became his favourite Court Painter, received other important offices and emoluments, and after his return from his second visit to Italy in 1651—the first visit had taken place in 1629—he was appointed Aposentador del Rey, a post which approximately corresponds with that of Court-Marshal. He died on the 6th of August 1660, from the results of fatigue and overwork in supervising the arrangements for the betrothal of the Infanta Maria Teresa to Louis xiv. at the Palace on the Isle of Pheasants, at Irun. With the exception of the early bodegones of his student-years and a few rare excursions into the realm of religious and mythological composition, Velazquez’s life-work, as conditioned by the patronage of the king and the Court, was practically confined to portraiture. His unrivalled greatness in this sphere is due to the perfect clearness of his vision, which made him grasp the person or scene before his eyes at a single glance, and transpose his impression to canvas with undisturbed directness and completeness, and with an apparent disregard of the means of expression. There is dignity and soberness in all his portraits; perfect spacing; noble, firm The Infanta, who appears to be about four years of age, is wearing a white robe embroidered with black. She is seen standing at half length, her right hand on the arm of a chair. Painted in oil on canvas. Inscribed:—“linfante marguerite.” 2 ft. 3¾ in. × 1 ft. 11½ in. (0·70 × 0·59.) THE INFANTAIn the Louvre collection there is but one picture from which it is possible to judge the greatness of Velazquez’s art. That picture is the deservedly famous and often-copied portrait of the little Infanta Margarita (No. 1731, Plate XXV.), which has rightly been placed in the Salon CarrÉ among the proudest possessions which the Gallery can boast. The little princess, who was born in 1651, the first child of Mariana of Austria, is here depicted at the age of about four, so that the date of the portrait may safely be assumed to be about the year 1655, and not 1659, as suggested by M. Lafenestre. She is dressed in a white robe with black lace trimmings. A pink ribbon is tied on her right side to her soft light golden hair, which falls in curls to her shoulders; her right hand rests upon a chair, whilst the left, the fingers of which have been repainted owing to the addition of a narrow strip of canvas at the bottom, holds a flower. On the top the words linfante margverite are painted in heavy block letters across the whole width of the canvas. This picture, in which childlike ingenuousness is so happily blended with quaint dignity, and in which even the forbidding ugliness MARIANA OF AUSTRIAThe other unquestionably authentic work by the master at the Louvre is to be found in the La Caze Bequest. It is catalogued as Portrait of the Infanta Maria Teresa, afterwards Queen of France (No. 1735), but is in reality a portrait of Queen Mariana of Austria, the mother of the Infanta Margarita Maria. Mariana was married to Philip iv. as his second wife in 1649, at the age of fourteen. Velazquez was at that time in Italy, so that the duty of painting her first portrait for the royal bridegroom fell to the Court Painter’s son-in-law and chief pupil, Juan Bautista del Mazo (1610–1667). The portrait at the Louvre was, if we may judge from the apparent age of the child-queen as she is here represented, painted in 1651, when Velazquez had returned from his second Italian journey and when Mariana was sixteen years of age. It was probably a preliminary study from life for the larger portrait in the Vienna Gallery. This admirable portrait is another artistic triumph over unfavourable conditions imposed by the hideousness of contemporary female attire, although the forehead has been spoilt by clumsy repainting. The coiffure in particular, a cascade of false hair, bows, jewels, and feathers, is more suggestive of some exotic idol or fetish than of a human being. In 1863, before the judgment of a tasteless age, which gave Velazquez a position far below the then absurdly overrated Murillo, was revised, this portrait of Mariana appeared at the Viardot sale and failed to realise more than £200! COPIES AND SCHOOL PICTURESTwo other portraits in the La Caze Room are attributed to Velazquez. One of these, a Portrait of Philip IV. (No. 1733) at the age of about fifty, is unquestionably a wholly uninspired and fairly modern copy of the head in the Prado (No. 1080). The other, a Portrait of a Young Woman (No. 1736), is an extremely feeble imitation of the superficial aspect of Velazquez’s manner—so bad in drawing, especially in the attachment of the nose to the face, that it is difficult to accept SeÑor Beruete’s attribution of this picture to Juan CarreÑo de Miranda (1614–1685), an able painter of the Madrid school. M. Henri Rodolphe Elissa, who exposed the “Tiara of Saitaphernes” forgery, has asserted that he can prove both the Philip IV. and the Young Woman to be the work of the Spanish painter Escosura, who died in the last decade of the nineteenth century. There appears to be no reason to doubt his assertion. The head of Philip, more than the other picture, appears to be nineteenth-century work. The Portrait of Philip IV., King of Spain, in Hunting Costume (No. 1732), with a gun in his right hand and a dog sitting by his side, in a landscape background, is only a contemporary copy of a very similar picture in the Prado, to which it is vastly inferior in execution. It is true that in the Prado picture the king’s hat is on his head, whilst in the Louvre version, which is probably by Mazo, he carries it in his left hand. It is, however, possible to detect in the Prado portrait clear evidence of a pentimento, from which it can be seen that here, too, the hat was originally in the same position as in the Louvre canvas. Presumably Velazquez subsequently made the alteration; but the copy was executed at an earlier date. THE “MEETING OF THIRTEEN PEOPLE”There have been great divergences of opinion concerning the strange little painting representing a Meeting of Thirteen People (No. 1734) on a hill. It was formerly known as A Meeting of Artists, because two of the Spanish cavaliers depicted in the group were believed to represent Velazquez and Murillo. Lauded at first as one of Velazquez’s masterpieces by those who were carried away by the truly extraordinary beauty of the pearly, opalescent colour harmony and the atmospheric quality of the painting, the little picture has lately been as violently abused for its “poor design, weak execution, and commonplace arrangement.” As a matter of fact the arrangement is anything but commonplace, and the picture has great qualities of technique which will always be the delight of professional artists. It is moreover admirably varied in gesture and action, even if it has certain weaknesses which render impossible its unqualified attribution to Velazquez. Here we have clearly an excellent example of his son-in-law and imitator, J. B. del Mazo. If any proof were needed for this attribution, it will be found in the figure on the extreme left of the composition. Both his legs are slanting forward so much that his centre of gravity plumbs behind his heels. It would really be impossible to maintain this posture, which, though it offends against the laws of gravity, is to be found in quite a number of Mazo’s pictures, as, for instance, in the small figure of Olivarez (?) in the middle distance on the right in the Duke of Westminster’s Don Baltazar Carlos in the Riding School, in the portrait of Don Baltazar Carlos at The Hague, and in the second boy in The Family of Mazo at the Vienna Gallery. The soundly painted Portrait of Don Pedro de Altamira, Doyen of the Chapel Royal at Toledo, afterwards Cardinal (No. 1737), inscribed on the background “Æt 54 dv, 1633,” is a good character There is in the Spanish section of the Louvre another superbly painted, but very problematic, Head of a Man (No. 1747), which, on no more plausible grounds than an accidental likeness to one of the figures in The Forge of Vulcan, has by some critics been believed to be by Velazquez. The rich impasto and the careful finish of the painting are utterly unlike Velazquez’s manner; nor does the picture appear to be of his period. But whoever may be its author, it is one of the most remarkable paintings in this section of the Louvre. MURILLOBy far the best represented of all the masters at the Spanish school is BartolomÉ EstÉban Murillo (1618?–1682). He was born at Seville, of poor parents, and studied as a boy under Juan del Castillo. Forced before he had reached manhood to gain his livelihood, he took to manufacturing artistically worthless devotional pictures on saga-cloth, for sale at the weekly fairs in the poor quarter of Seville. This early practice of rather mechanical production, and the habit, acquired by necessity, of working to please the public, clung to him in after life and are responsible for much that the modern mind finds distasteful in his art—a certain sickly sentimentality that often takes the place of real sentiment, and an artificiality of arrangement even where the types are realistic renderings of the people among whom he spent his days. With his small savings from the proceeds of his crude popular pictures Murillo proceeded to Madrid, where Velazquez assisted him by deed, advice, and example, though the two artists were probably “THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION”It is not, however, to pictures of this type that Murillo owed his widespread popularity. Generations of enthusiastic admirers have stood in silent awe before his large painting of The Immaculate Conception (No. 1709, Plate XXVI.), which is certainly one of the best of innumerable versions of the same subject—the Virgin standing on a crescent moon, with ecstatic gaze, and hands pressed to her breast, and surrounded by swarms of joyous angel-children—painted by Murillo to meet an apparently insatiable demand. There is something of real ecstasy in this conception. To find a similar morbidezza of pigment one must turn to certain famous works by Andrea del Sarto: it is a quality which is generally conspicuously absent from Spanish painting and which, if carried a step farther, as it sometimes was carried by Murillo, would result in fuzzy vapidness. This famous picture has the distinction of being the most costly purchase ever made for the Louvre, the price paid for it at the Marshal Soult sale The Virgin, wearing a white robe with a blue mantle over her left shoulder, has her hands crossed over her breast; she is standing in the hollow of a two-horned crescent, and gazing heavenwards. About twenty-one cherubs and ten heads are seen in different parts of the composition. Painted in oil on canvas. 9 ft. 0 in. × 6 ft. 3 in. (2·74 × 1·90.) Apparently of earlier date is the other version of the same subject at the Louvre. This Immaculate Conception (No. 1708) is not painted in the same spirit of exaltation as the version just described, but has a happy passage of realistic character-painting in the six kneeling figures on the left. On the right two angels carry a scroll with the inscription in principio dilexit eam. The picture was painted in 1656–57 for the Church of Santa Maria la Blanca at Seville, and was carried off to France, with many other of the master’s works, by Marshal Soult. THE “BIRTH OF THE VIRGIN”Another picture that formed part of the loot taken by Napoleon’s general and was taken in 1855 from his son, the Duke of Dalmatia, in liquidation of a debt of £6000, is The Birth of the Virgin (No. 1710). The National Gallery in London owns a small preliminary study for this painting, which was executed in 1655 for Seville Cathedral. The centre is occupied by a beautifully disposed group of four women and four winged heavenly visitors attending to the Infant’s bath; in the background on the left St. Anne, raised in her bed, is receiving visitors, and on the right are seen two attendants airing linen at a fireplace. The strange assemblage, in which the earthly and the heavenly are without incongruity brought into such close contact that one of the boy-angels is actually occupied with a dog, is completed by another four angels floating in the air above the Infant. In composition, distribution of light and shade, and in harmonious blending of mellow colour this picture ranks among Murillo’s highest achievements. According to Cean “THE ANGELS’ KITCHEN”Yet another deservedly famous work by Murillo, removed from a Franciscan convent at Seville by the insatiable greed of Marshal Soult, is the now extensively restored large picture known as The Miracle of San Diego, or The Angels’ Kitchen (No. 1716). The composition is divided by two large figures of angels into two halves. On the left two knights of Calatrava are shown in by a Franciscan brother and behold St. Diego in prayer miraculously raised into the air and surrounded by a flood of light. On the right the angels are occupied with the preparation of the repast for which the Saint has sent his prayer to the Virgin. A Franciscan is watching the scene from the distance with a gesture of amazement. Here again the real and the supernatural are blended with unaffected naÏvetÉ, the unity of the contending elements being established by the masterly rendering of light and atmosphere. An account of the miracle is given on a cartouche in the foreground; whilst a piece of paper on the left holds the signature BART-EST. MURILLO, 1646. The Angels’ Kitchen was bought from the despoiler’s heirs for £3420. The Virgin of the Rosary (No. 1712), unlike the majority of Murillo’s representations of the Mother of God, has scarcely a trace of spiritual exaltation, but is merely a handsome type of a The Holy Family (No. 1713), also known as The Virgin of Seville, is a genuine and characteristic, though strangely overrated work by the master, and bears the signature BARTOLOM DE MURILLO F. HISPAN. The Virgin in Glory (No. 1711) is, to say the least, of doubtful authenticity. The small companion pictures, Christ in the Garden of Olives (No. 1714) and Christ at the Column and St. Peter (No. 1715), are painted on marble, to which fact they owe the unpleasant coldness of their colouring. In the La Caze Room are two portraits, The Poet Quevedo (No. 1718) and The Duke of OssuÑa (No. 1719), which the official Catalogue ascribes to Murillo. Quite apart from the fact that the artist was only six years of age when the Duke of OssuÑa died, the quality of the painting does not justify these attributions. Like the head of Philip iv. in the same room, they were probably painted by Escosura, a late-nineteenth-century Spaniard THE SCHOOL OF MADRIDWe must now return to Madrid, where the example of Velazquez had inspired a fairly numerous group of able painters without particular genius, whose art, being entirely derivative, carried within itself the germ of decay and sank to complete insignificance before the close of the century. The most distinguished artist of this group is Juan Bautista del Mazo, who has already been referred to as the author of the Meeting of Thirteen People and probably of the Philip IV. in Hunting Costume. So well did he succeed in appropriating his father-in-law’s style that his best works have frequently passed under his illustrious master’s name. Another important painter of the Madrid school is CarreÑo de Miranda (Nos. 1614–1685), who benefited by Velazquez’s patronage, became painter of the Palace in 1669, and Court Painter and Assistant Seneschal in 1671. Although in his later years he devoted himself largely to subject pictures which are distinguished by a warmer colouring than most of the productions by the Madrid school of the period, he achieved his greatest successes as a portrait painter. He was considerably influenced by the paintings of Van Dyck, which he had occasion to study in the royal palaces. His large St. Ambrose distributing Alms (No. 1702), in the La Caze Gallery, is a hurriedly executed work which does not show his art to the best advantage. It figured in the sale of the Soult collection, when it failed to realise £20. Far more typical of its author’s best manner is The Burning Bush (No. 1703) by Francisco Collantes (1599–1656), a Madrid painter who studied under Vincente Carducho, but was influenced by Bassano. He was an excellent colourist, especially in his landscape paintings with small figures. His most famous picture is The Vision of Ezekiel, formerly at the Buen Retiro Palace and now in the Prado Gallery. Juan de Arellano (1614–1676), the painter of the Flowers (No. 1701), worked at Madrid, unknown and in abject poverty, until at the age of thirty-six he began to devote himself to flower-painting, a branch of art in which he developed considerable skill, and rose to great popularity. Yet another Madrid painter who is but indifferently represented at the Louvre by a still life of Fruit and Musical Instruments (No. 1720) in the La Caze collection, is Antonio Pereda (1599–1669). Although a contemporary of Velazquez and working in the same city, he was not appreciably influenced by that master. He was a pupil of Pedro de las Cuevas, and his style shows certain The end of the seventeenth century marked the complete decadence of the Spanish school, which was precipitated and received its final seal by the advent in 1692 of the Neapolitan Luca Giordano, whose rare facility in the production of showy, flashy, meretricious works earned for him the sobriquet “Fa Presto,” and whose prodigious success was a powerful incentive to emulation. More fatal even than the influence of Luca Giordano was that of the German artist Raphael Mengs, an uninspired eclectic who became Court Painter to Charles iii., and who is referred to in the chapter dealing with the German pictures at the Louvre. GOYAIn this time of complete stagnation the fascinating personality of Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) flashes like a bright meteor through the dark night of Spanish art. Goya takes a unique position in the art of his country—or, indeed, of the world. He was as much the last of the old masters as he is the first of the moderns. A man of fiery temperament, impulsive, unruly, opposed to authority, he was terribly unequal in his performance. It is as unnecessary to state who were his masters as it is impossible to speak of his style in general terms, for there probably never was an artist who worked in so many different styles, experimented in so many different mediums, and treated so vast a range of subjects as Goya. He was a creature of moods, and changed his method of painting as easily as his political allegiance from Bourbon to Bonaparte and back again to Bourbon. His four pictures at the Louvre are without exception portraits, and do not therefore illustrate his highly developed sense of the dramatic. But they serve admirably to show his |