He might have been content with similar results and pursued the development of his personality with the aid of this quickly acquired and scholarly technique. But, soon after his arrival in Madrid and from the time that he was appointed painter to the king (1624), his style changed. He created for himself, by an act of his intelligence and his will, that facile, rapid and almost fault less technique, in which he combines power, breadth and mellow ness, and seems with one brush-stroke to render form, expression and light, a truly incomparable manner which is the very per fection of painting. It is unique in satisfying at once both the ignorant and the connoisseur. A canvas by Velazquez, particularly a head by him, since he was primarily a portraitist, is immediately accessible to the most unlearned spectator, who can admire with out effort its truth, its life and what seems to him its simple and striking effect. However, the initiate who knows the difficulties of the art of painting, delights in the marvellous science, the subtleties and refinements which permit a most gifted artist to realise a creation so similar, indeed so equivalent, to a work of nature. Rubens and the Venetians taught Velazquez much; he would not have denied it ; but of the generations of painters who have questioned them with respect, anxiety and even enthusiasm, who has drawn from them a style of painting comparable to that of Velazquez? We may say that the man who found all things easy, save the expression of passion, doubt and anguish, deliber ated clearly on the different obligations of his life. With court duties and ceremonies encroaching more and more on his time he had need to evolve a sort of script appropriate to the circum stances. Thus necessity, the mother of invention, gave us the enchantment which we feel in the works of this painter who is, as Manet said and others have thought, "the painter's painter." Some may murmur: "Yes, those who desire it have in Velazquez an incomparable painter; but this tremendous imitator of life has no imagination." These captious critics are perhaps right if they mean by imagination the faculty of translating plastically legendary themes, fables and mythology, of composing allegories and covering a ceiling with winged or floating creatures making gestures unrelated to terrestrial usage. But is it not imagination, and that of an order most appropriate to a painter, to compose with a restrained palette an entirely novel range of colours, full of distinction and subtlety as well as force, and to play on it with the faultless touch of an accomplished musician? These har monies at once sober, refined, and peculiar to him, contribute to the very individual impression we experience before Velazquez's masterpieces, whether they be portraits or compositions in which the portraiture is the essential element. Their truth is imposed on us with so much force that we are tempted, under the impact of the sensation, to accuse even the greatest of other painters of falsehood; poetic falsehood, pathetic falsehood, all the loveliest forms of falsehood if you will ; but falsehood, none the less.
However, if the picture takes hold of us, it is not only because it makes us see what our eyes ought to have seen and have missed, but because it opens to us an unknown world created by art, before which we stand thunderstruck, holding our breath as at a magical apparition. Velazquez was continually painting por traits of the king, the infantes and infantas, and the same princes and nobles. In spite of his loyalty as a courtier, which amounted to devotion, he used no artifice to embellish his models, he hid none of their awkwardnesses or oddities. However, by virtue of the supreme elegance and distinction innate in him, he offers us images of his aristocratic models of which we from the first admire the beauty ; they are charming, attractive, imposing or disturbing and they hold our attention indefinitely like enigmas.
It may be that Velazquez was not entirely successful in his various essays in religious painting. There again, we may note an original trait of his personality in devotional Spain and at the time when the old Ribera and the young Murillo enjoyed so much success in the interpretation of Christian themes, the one with dramatic intensity, the other with suavity. Still we may say that
if his Coronation of the Virgin lends itself to some extent to the reproach of coldness, its composition is of perfect and original elegance, and his type of Madonna resembles no other. If he had executed no more than his large Christ on the Cross, to-day in the Prado, that would have been enough. It is perhaps the loveliest modern image of the divine Crucified, simply conceived from the indications of the liturgy, painted for all the faithful, great and small, and with all the resources of a skilled technique.
Finally three great compositions set the seal to Velazquez's glory; his originality is completely affirmed in them as well as the sovereign elegance of his genius in invention. These compositions are the Lances or the Surrender of Breda, the Meninas and Tapestry Weavers. The Lances was an official picture ordered by the king in honour of a military event regarded as glorious for the monarchy; it fulfilled the same function as, later on, did the canvases of Van der Meulen celebrating the splendours of Louis XIV. But, without disdaining the faithful and picturesque an nalist Van der Meulen, what a difference lay between the two! This noble and easy composition overspread with a fine light, this chivalrous air, these fine portraits, this blue and silver sky striped by the line of lances, all is the invention of a supremely intelligent great artist. It is the finest historical picture in exis tence, and we can say further, the only one to belong to the high est category of artistic creation.
The Meninas and the Tapestry Weavers are still greater. By a miracle of hidden art which shows nothing concerted, calculated or arranged, these two canvases which represent, the one a corner apparently chosen at random in the tapestry weaving factory of Santa Barbara, the other a room in the Royal Palace in which Velazquez himself is painting the portraits of Philip IV. and his second wife, Maria-Anna of Austria, are works unique of their kind. They had no precedent and have been followed by no equivalent, though they contain inexhaustible lessons for modern painting. The word realism with its signification of preconceived ideas and deliberate demonstration fails to express them. The painter here had no fixed intention, he was neither for nor against what he saw, the action he represented, the human beings, royal personages, children, dwarfs or workers who participated in that action. We feel as if he neither loved nor blamed, indeed as if he experienced no feeling at all. Is there even a subject—properly speaking—in these two pictures? In the foreground of the one the weavers are occupied by their work and take the various poses necessitated by it. But in the background, under a quite different light, on a different level, some ladies, whose presence seems quite fortuitous, have just entered the factory and are looking at the tapestries they are shown ; and they resemble, one does not quite know why, a fairy apparition. There is no discord however, and above all no striving for effect. In the other pic ture the whole foreground is occupied by three elegant and charm ing figures, a little infanta stiff in her rich robes and two maids of honour eager to serve her. In the shadows are two dwarfs and a large dog. It is quite right that we have grown accustomed to call the picture the Meninas, though the subject is supposed to be Velazquez painting the portraits of the king and queen. Velazquez is indeed there, but in the middle distance and in shadow, and before him is an immense stretcher on which he paints the compo sition almost life-size. As for his august models, we have to look for them. Right in the background, shown in a dim light still further obscured by the curtains of the windows there are side by side two rectangles of light, one brighter than the other; the brighter is a door opening on a staircase on which a man turns towards us, and the other is a mirror reflecting the distant image of the king and queen posing for the painter. Thus there is a problem of subject and intention, or rather the apparent absence of the painter's intention is itself a problem. But his art affects us as a magical invocation of truth and life.