and, let us say, too good a painter also.  Although a realist, he brings to his art a lofty grandeur, a disdain of useless detail, and an intentional sacrifice that plainly reveal the sovereign master.  These sacrifices were not always those that another painter would have made.  Velasquez chose to put in evidence what, it sometimes seems, should have been left in shadow.  He extinguishes and he illuminates with apparent caprice, but the effect always justifies him.

The correctness of his eye was such that while he only pretended to be copying, he brought the soul to the surface and painted the inner and the outer man at the same time.  His portraits relate the secret Memoires of the Spanish court better than all the chroniclers.  Let him represent them in gala dress, riding their genets, in hunting-costume, an arquebuse in their hand, a greyhound at their feet, and we recognize in these wan figures of kings, queens, and infantas, with pale faces, red lips, and massive chins the degeneracy of Charles V. and the falling away of exhausted dynasties.  Although a court-painter, he has not flattered his royal models.  However, despite the brainlessness of the type, the quality of these high personages would never be doubted.  It is not that he did not know how to paint genius; the portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares, so noble, so imperious, and so full of authority, unanswerably proves that, unable to lend any fire to these sad lords, he gives them a cold majesty, a wearied dignity, a gesture and pose of etiquette, and then envelops all with his magnificent colour; that was full payment for the protection of his crowned friend.  M. Paul de Saint-Victor has somewhere called Victor Hugo “The Spanish Grandee of poetry;” may we not be permitted to call Velasquez “The Spanish Grandee of painting”?  No qualification would suit him better.

As we have said, Velasquez was Court Chamberlain, and it was he who was charged with the preparation of the lodgings of the King in the trip that Philip IV. made to Irun to deliver the Infanta Dona Maria-Teresa to the King of France.  It was he who had decorated and ornamented the pavilion where the interview of the two kings took place in the Ile des Faisans.  Velasquez was distinguished among the crowd of courtiers by his personal dignity, the elegance, the richness, and the good taste of his costumes on which he arranged with art the diamonds and jewels,—­gifts of the sovereigns; but on his return to Madrid, he fell ill with fatigue and died on the 7th of August, 1660.  His widow, Dona Juana Pacheco, only survived him seven days and was interred near him in the parish of San Juan.  The funeral of Velasquez was splendid; great personages, knights of the military orders, the King’s household, and the artists were present sad and pensive, as if they felt that with Velasquez they were interring Spanish art.

    Guide de l’Amateur au Musee du Louvre (Paris, 1882).

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