Chapter L: Costa F (3)

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 DALMAU

The Louvre is fortunate in possessing an authentic and extremely important, though badly restored, altarpiece by Ludovico Luis de Dalmau, the first Spanish painter whose personality emerges definitely from the obscurity of the Gothic period in Spain. Dalmau was a Catalan who flourished about the middle of the fifteenth century, and who, although not a direct pupil of the Van Eycks, shows such close affinity with their style that certain modern critics are inclined to ascribe to him, with insufficient reason, certain pictures, like the _Fountain of Living Water_ at the Prado, by the heads and founders of the Bruges school. In spite of the different types and the increased angularity of the drapery folds in Dalmau’s _Enthronement of St. Isidore_ (No. 1703A), this Eyckian influence is clearly traceable in the Louvre picture, which shows the Virgin enthroned under a Gothic canopy wearing a crown of typically Spanish form, and handing the pallium to the saintly Bishop of Seville, who kneels on the left. Further back on the same side are four angels with the episcopal insignia. The group is balanced on the right by St. Anthony the Hermit in the foreground, and SS. Catherine, Margaret, Agatha, Odilia, and Apollonia grouped around the throne. The picture was originally in a church at Valladolid, and was bought for the Louvre at the Bourgeois sale at Cologne in 1904 for £3025.

LUIS MORALES

We 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 bent for the sombre and tragic—the sufferings of Christ and of the Virgin, and similar themes. The _Christ carrying the Cross_ (No. 1707) is a typical instance of the tragic intensity of his conception. All the suffering of the Saviour is expressed in His drawn features and His heavy, swollen eyelids. The picture is not dated, but was evidently painted before 1564, in which year the master was called to the Escorial and, while in the service of Philip II., to a great extent lost his individual style in the imitation of the Italians, that was probably forced upon him by the taste of his patrons.

EL GRECO

We 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 extravagant exaggeration; the ecstatic passionate action and gesture of his figures reveal contortion and frenzy. As a portrait painter El Greco is second only to Velazquez in the school of his adopted country. His biographer, Señor Cossío, has called him “a painter of souls,” because he had that intense power of penetration which perceives and retains at a glance the sum total of a person’s traits of character.

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 SEVILLE

The 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 dictating his Doctrine_ (No. 1706) at the Louvre, in spite of the essentially Spanish manner in which the design fills the space (the figures being grouped in horizontal courses right across the canvas, with very little space above for the sky, and this little space filled with angels’ heads and with a Holy Ghost as fierce as the rest of the assembly), there is a noble rhythm of line as well as of the distribution of light and shade, which proclaims the mind of a master. The two Saints in the immediate foreground, St. Dominic and St. Bernard, are cut through at the waist—another favourite device of Spanish composition, which we have already noticed in the Donors of El Greco’s _Christ on the Cross_.

ZURBARÁN

Considerable 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 his signature on one of his pictures; and in this capacity he painted at Madrid his only known secular pictures, a series of ten Scenes from the History of Hercules.

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.

RIBERA

Ribera, 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 Ribera, even where he is most Italian, never denies his Spanish nationality and the teaching of his first master.

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.

VELAZQUEZ

The 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 of all but two that figure in the list. Velazquez, who was destined to stamp his great personality on a whole generation of Spanish painters, but whose art was little known in Northern Europe previous to the Peninsular War, has exercised a paramount influence on modern art. He was born of noble descent at Seville in June 1599. Although originally destined for another profession, he showed such talent for art that he was allowed to enter the studio of Francisco Herrera, of whose realistic tendencies and rugged strength we have already had occasion to speak.

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 contour; complete unity of all the parts produced by the sense of ambient atmosphere. And never is there the slightest hint of trick of hand, or mannerism, or painting by recipe. Each picture is the result of close observation, recorded with admirable directness and honesty. This supreme master of the painter’s technique seemed to pay no attention to technique—or, at least, the result is invariably so significant and so absorbingly interesting that the spectator, unless he approaches the picture with deliberate intention to probe its secret, never thinks of the technical means by which life so convincing has been breathed on to the canvas.

(1599-1660)

SPANISH SCHOOL

No. 1731.—PORTRAIT OF THE INFANTA MARGARITA

(Portrait de l’infante Margarita Maria)

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 INFANTA

In 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 of the dress of the period cannot destroy the little princess’s grace and doll-like charm, Velazquez has surely left to the world one of the most entrancing portraits of lovable childhood that is to be found in the whole history of art.

MARIANA OF AUSTRIA

The 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 PICTURES

Two 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-study of an energetic and rather worldly-looking Church dignitary, but does not appear to be either by Velazquez or one of his immediate followers.

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.

MURILLO

By 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 never in the relation of master and pupil. After about two years thus profitably spent at Madrid, Murillo returned to Seville, where he continued to work until his death in 1682, and rose to the very summit of fame and popularity. At his best Murillo was a colourist of great charm and a technician of the rarest skill. His art is most admirable where he adheres most closely to the realistic tradition of his country. It is scarcely to be credited that the same hand which produced so many vaporous and vapid Madonnas is responsible for a picture painted with such superb breadth and incisive vigour as _The Young Beggar_ (No. 1717), which is almost worthy of the brush of Velazquez in his Sevillan period. The decidedly unsavoury subject is made acceptable by the consummate artistry of the treatment.

“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 in 1852—that is many years before American competition had established the vastly enhanced standards of value which now prevail—being as much as 615,300 fr., or £24,612.

(1618?-1682)

SPANISH SCHOOL

No. 1709—THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

(La Conception immaculée de la Vierge)

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 Bermudez, the roundness, beauty of shape, and rosy complexion of the waiting-woman’s arm in the foreground “excited the jealous envy of the ladies of Seville.” It is interesting to note that before its acquisition by the Louvre the _Birth of the Virgin_ was brought to England in 1823, when the owners vainly tried to find a purchaser.

“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 happy and contented Spanish mother. The folds of her outer garment are arranged in florid and meaningless profusion.

_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 MADRID

We 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 affinities with Ribera. His works are rarely to be met with outside the galleries and churches of his own country.

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.

GOYA

In 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 active protest against the classicist affectation prevalent at his time, and his return to the healthy realism which is the heritage of his race. The _Portrait of F. Guillemardet, Ambassador of the French Republic to Spain_ (No. 1704), is an admirably honest piece of portraiture, dignified but perfectly natural in pose, strong in expression and pleasing in colour. It was bequeathed to the Louvre by Guillemardet, together with the _Young Spanish Woman_ (No. 1705) in a black mantilla, standing with crossed arms against a pearly-grey landscape background. The seated half-figure of the rather corpulent _Young Spanish Woman_ (No. 1705A) was bought at the Kums sale at Antwerp for £1276; and the portrait of _Don Perez de Castro_ (No. 1705B) was acquired in 1902 for £1200. Goya was an isolated figure in Spanish art of the time. He left no “school,” but his influence was one of the leading factors in the rise of the modern movement in France.

THE DUTCH SCHOOL

We have already followed the development of the early Flemish or Netherlandish art during the fifteenth century, and observed how it eventually passed under the Italianising influences which are unmistakable in the pictures of Barend van Orley (1495?-1542) and his contemporaries. The early painters of Holland as distinct from Flanders cannot be traced with any certainty much farther back than Albert von Ouwater (fl. 1420-1460), who worked at Haarlem from 1430 to 1460. As we have already seen, the early Flemish painter, Gerard David (1460?-1523), was born at Ouwater, which may well have had its school of painters. Neither Albert von Ouwater, who is represented to-day by a single work, the _Raising of Lazarus_ in the Berlin Gallery, nor his unidentifiable contemporary who painted the _Exhumation of St. Hubert_, in the National Gallery (No. 783), are included in the collection of pictures at the Louvre.

GERARD OF HAARLEM

The influence of these painters and Dierick Bouts is seen in the rare works of Geertgen tot S. Jans, or Gerard of Haarlem (1465-1493) whose _Raising of Lazarus_ (No. 2563A) in this collection is an achievement of the highest order, and was purchased as recently as 1902 for £4000 from Baron d’Albenas, after having been for many years in Spain. This pupil or follower of the Ouwater master was a native of Leyden, and worked at Haarlem. He took his name from the commandery of the Knights of St. John at Haarlem for whom he worked, as we see from the careful inscription, “_Gerardus Leydanus pictor ad S. Io. Baptist. Harlem pinxt_,” on his triptych at Vienna.

Among his contemporaries were Cornelis Engelbrechtsen, who was born in 1468 at Leyden, where he died in 1533, and Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533). The latter played an important part as an engraver quite as much as a painter in the university town of Leyden, which now possesses his large _Last Judgment_ and became famous as the birthplace of Rembrandt in 1606. The Louvre possesses no picture by either Engelbrechtsen or Lucas van Leyden.

Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen (fl. 1470-1533) is also unrepresented here. Portraits by painters in this group are often confused, as in the case of the _Portrait of the Duke of East Friesland_, in the Oldenburg Gallery, which has been attributed to both Lucas van Leyden and Jacob Cornelisz. A pupil of the latter may have painted the _Cana of Galilee_ (No. 2640C). It is safe to assign to “the Master of the Female Half Figures,” the _Young Lady Reading_ (No. 2641C), which has a close analogy with the well-known picture in the Harrach collection at Vienna, representing half-length figures of three young ladies in crimson velvet dresses cut square at the neck, and singing to the accompaniment of a flute and a lute. The name of this painter is not known, but his pictures, which are neither numerous nor of any conspicuous merit, are easily recognisable.

To this period of transition and mediocre painting belongs Jan Scorel (1495-1562), whose _Portrait of Paracelsus the Doctor_ (No. 2567A) is inscribed:

“FORMOSO DOCTOR PARASELSUS,”

and is in every way superior to the _Portrait of a Man_ (No. 2641B), which is labelled with the name of Scorel, but catalogued as being by an unknown artist. From Scorel, a much travelled Dutch artist, who at one time worked at Nuremburg with Albrecht Dürer and visited Venice and the East, we naturally pass to Jan Mostaert of Haarlem. Mostaert of Haarlem is unrepresented at the Louvre, a remark which equally well applies to the anonymous “Pseudo-Mostaert,” who painted so much in his style that a large number of inferior productions have been credited to him from time to time. Pictures of this type vary so considerably that the name “Pseudo-Mostaert” is little more than a generic designation for unassignable Flemish and Dutch pictures of the middle of the sixteenth century; such pictures bear some relationship to the _Christ bearing His Cross_ (No. 2299), and the _Abraham’s Sacrifice_ (No. 2300), officially attributed to the little-known and quite negligible painter Alart Claeszoon (1498-1564) of Leyden.

SIR ANTONIS MOR

From Leyden we may pass to Utrecht, which was the birthplace of the much-travelled, distinguished, and cosmopolitan painter, Antonis Mor (1512-1578?). He was a pupil of Jan Scorel, but soon freed himself from the hard manner he acquired under that master by his study in Italy of the best works of the Venetians. Indeed, some of his pictures have passed as the work of Calcar, the pupil of Titian. Mor, or Moro, excelled as a painter of vigorous and truthful portraits, and the portraits and replicas he painted of Queen Mary are well known. The Prado Gallery at Madrid and the Vienna Gallery contain good examples of his art, and he is fairly well represented in the Louvre. While he was in the service of Philip II. of Spain he lived in much splendour, and was amply paid for his work. His close intimacy with the monarch induced him on one occasion to take the liberty of touching with a brush dipped in red paint the hand of the king. This serious breach of Court etiquette created a profound impression on the courtiers present; and, although the painter sued for pardon and obtained it from the king, he soon recognised that he had made himself obnoxious to the Inquisition, who asserted that Moro had got from the heretic English, while painting the portrait of Queen Mary, a charm that enabled him to bewitch the Spanish monarch. Being thus compelled to leave Spain, he settled in Antwerp, where he died between 1576 and 1578.

The pictures of Mor, who was the contemporary of Titian, at different periods of his art bear traces of the Dutch, Spanish, and Flemish schools. He in turn also had an influence on the portrait painters of Spain half a century before the birth of Velazquez. The _Portrait of a Man_ (No. 2478), which is signed and dated:

“_ANT MORO pingebat, 1565_,”

was in the past held by some writers to bear the features of Sir Francis Drake, who was, however, at the date here given only twenty-one years of age. The two large paintings in the Duchâtel Bequest which pass as the _Portrait of Louis de Rio_ and _His Wife_ (No. 2480 and No. 2481) are, judging by the attitudes of the figures and the shape of the panels, the wings of a large altarpiece. _The Dwarf of Charles V._ (No. 2479) reminds us that the painter, while still young, was taken into the service of that emperor. _The Portrait of Edward VI. of England_ (No. 2481A) bears a very suspicious-looking inscription.

SPANISH OPPRESSION

The political events of the reign of Philip II. of Spain, the mistaken, mischievous, and oppressive policy he adopted with regard to his territory in the Netherlands, and the contempt with which he treated his Dutch subjects, soon alienated their sympathies; but the Duke of Alva by his harshness and bigotry incited them to frenzy. When he set forth in 1567, all hope of peace and mercy fled before him, and within a short period his tyranny and ferocity fanned the flame of rebellion, which after a struggle of eighty years was to end in the Peace of Münster of 1648. In that year Spain ignominiously surrendered, and the independence of the northern Netherlands was recognised. During the long period which elapsed between the Union of Utrecht in 1579 and the negotiations at Osnabrück and Münster in 1648 must have been destroyed innumerable religious pictures, the loss of which renders it almost impossible for us to estimate the full significance of artistic endeavour in Holland in the closing years of the sixteenth century.

A new era in Dutch history, social life and art was beginning to open out by the year 1612, when Abraham Blomaert (1564-1651) painted and signed his very large _Nativity_ (No. 2327), which was formerly attributed to Bernardino Fassolo. Blomaert’s _Portrait of a Man_ (No. 2327A) is also a signed work.

HISTORY AND PORTRAIT PAINTERS

Blomaert’s contemporary, Michiel Jansz Mierevelt (1567-1641), who was at one time Court painter to the Princes of Orange at The Hague, and was with undue flattery hailed as the “New Xeuxis of Delft,” is represented by the _Portrait of Olden Barnevelt_ (No. 2465) and three other portraits, one of which (No. 2466) is in a very bad state. Stiff but characteristic is the _Portrait of a Woman_ (No. 2534), which was painted by Jan van Ravesteyn (1572-1657) in 1633, while his initials are also found on a panel (No. 2535) which was commissioned of him in the following year. Although Gerard Verspronck (1600-1651) was many years his junior, and in 1641, in the period of his maturity, achieved the _Portrait of a Lady_ (No. 2576A), the top corners of which have been added, he painted on the lines of tradition, and showed little originality. He came under the influence of Frans Hals, under whose name his pictures often pass.

CORNELIS JANSSEN

Nor can it be said that the numerous portraits which Cornelis Janssen van Ceulen (1593-1664?) undertook in England, give signs of the new artistic impulse which was daily manifesting itself in Holland in the early works of Frans Hals. Janssen, who was baptized at the Dutch Reformed Church, Austin Friars, London, throve until the establishment in England of Van Dyck, before whom he quickly had to give way; although he withdrew to Kent and lived in retirement, he did not receive the Speaker’s warrant to pass beyond seas until 1643. That “Cornelius Johnson Picture Drawer” made use of pallid flesh tones and lifeless grey tones, is obvious from the two portraits (No. 2338 and No. 2339) exhibited in the Louvre.

The very modern looking _Portrait of a Young Man_ (No. 2303A), signed “D. BAILLY,” is officially held to be the work of a Leyden painter of that name who would appear to have been a contemporary of Cornelis Janssen.

FRANS HALS

Although the great Dutch painter, Frans Hals (1580?-1666) was born at Antwerp, his parents were natives of Haarlem, whither he removed about 1600, and where he settled for the remainder of his eventful, irregular, and improvident career. This lusty and unromantic master by his forceful characterisation, his rapid wielding of his brush, and his frank realism, in a few years transformed the earlier portrait-making of Holland, and the rendering of the commonplace and obvious likeness of an individual, as seen in the works of Moreelse and others, into the region of great art. He was by about a quarter of a century the senior of Rembrandt, who is the greatest genius among Dutch painters, and developed his art on logical lines. It is, however, necessary to know the outstanding facts of his personal history, the fluctuating circumstances under which he worked, and the grinding poverty of his latest period. Perhaps no other painter in the whole range of art was so affected by his environment as Hals.

(1580?-1666)

DUTCH SCHOOL

No. 2384.—THE GIPSY GIRL

(La Bohémienne)

She wears a red dress, which is open at the neck; she smiles as she
turns her eyes to the right; half-length figure.

Painted in oil on canvas.

2 ft. 6 in. × 2 ft. 3 in. (0·76 × 0·68.)]