The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1899-11-14

ecclesiastical tyranny in art and dare
! to paint whatever he chose. He was
the only great secular artist of Spain.
1t is as well to frankly confess from
| the start the limitations and weak
neSSeS of Velasquez art. He had no
imagination or pathOs; he does not con-
ceive types or express emotions. HIS
drawing is often sadly defective and he
seldom shows any sense of the beauty
of line. He often composeS weakly, and
is crude or elementary in the manage
ment of accessories and backgrounds.
He was very slow in reaching mastery
in his art and his early work promised
nothing remarkable.
On the other hand we admire him as
supreme realiSt, as a master of quiet
dramatic art, as the greatest painter
of atmosphere He is supreme realist
because tempered by his surroundings,
he sloughed off all that was vulgar in
his earliest studies and gives us perfect
transcripts of the natural man. He is
great as a dramatist because he poses
his figures perfectly as if for stage re-
hearsal and is able to give elan with
out motion, the perfection of repreSSed
vigor without a trace of the drama of
emotion. And, finally, modern artists
worship him as well nigh the greatest
of old masters and the earliest of mod
erns most of all because of his technical
effects. He is uneQualed in giving SOL
idity and planes to his figures and in
placing them in an atmosphere palpi-
tating with reality, in differentiating
between absorbing and rejecting sur
faces and in reproducing the exact val
Ces even in the most elaborate interiors.
Artists appreciate the difficulty of even
approaching such perfection from afar.
and even the uninitiated are gripped
hard, without knowing why, by the ma
terial artistic truthfu,neSS that the
technique expresses.
Velasquez made few preliminary
sketches, as was customary with most
artists. He planned and studied but
little before the actual beginning of his
final work. He appears to have posed
or grouped his figures in tableau and
then TO have transferred them to the
canvas, with the greatest realism even
in such elaborate scenes as The Ia
pestry Weavers" and the Maids of
Honor" including the reproduction of
the atmospheric medium.
The results that he reached were at
tanned not of set purpose-for he had
no ideals-but through constant pre-
occupation for realism. assisted by
most delicate sense of color. For many
years there was not even a sign of his
later mastery of planes and of light 1t
was an unconscious growth. In fact.
there is nothing in the work of the first
fifteen years of his career as a painter
to indicate greatness. This slowness
was natural in him; it would have been
otherwise had he been an Illuminated
genius. Not before the ''Topers." paint
ed in 1929. just before the first Italian
trip, could a great career be even eus-
pected for him. All his fine work was
done after the age of 80.
Relying on his own eyesight. rather
than on traditions. methods or schools.
Velasquez does not reflect strongly the
influence of any artist. What we do
find never blurS the masters own per-
sonality. No man was less a mannerist,
and if it is natural to separate his work
into periods-O his juvenile produc-
ton at Seville; 90 his early court work
at Madrid go the period after his first
Italian trip, and (4 the period after his
second Italian trip-it is also true that
the changes are due not to the adoption
of new methods, but to the rational de-
velopment of the artist. His increasing
perfection of technique simply enabled
him to attempt new effects, and any
sameness, even at any one period in his
career, was avoided by his extreme
openness TO all shades of natural inn
pressions, which led him to adopt his
means to his ends with endless variety
Perhaps one of the most interesting of
his changes was from a reproducer of
detailed to one of general values, from
copying the design on royal gown and
the rouge on royal cheek to giving the |
differences between rejecting and alb !
sorbing shadows. or suggesting the eff
fects of debauchery in the fiabbiuess of |
the flesh tones. OF course, at times |
there Is an evident difference in the
quality of his brushwork, especially in |
some of his middle and later portraits, |
but this is easily applicable In that, |
for instance, of "Pulido Pareja'' we |
know that the coarser and bolder |
touch was caused simply by the use of !
longer brushes in order that the paint !
er could stand away from his canvas |
while painting. If there is a similar
and even more decidedly impressionistic |
in so much of Titian's /
later work we may be-sure that in We |
lasquez it was the result of the masters |
own striving for objective truthfulness.
The range of subjects treated by We |
lasquez is most interesting and charac-
Biblical subjects interested him
hardly at all. The "Joseph's Coat of |
his first italian trip was his only in /
cursion into the Old Testament field |
New Testament subjects he treated /
very seldom and almost entirely dur
ing his earliest years, while still in Sc
yife-as in his st. John in the Des-
ert,' his Alteration of the Kings in !
Madrid, his Alteration or the Shep- /
herds in London so like a Ribera, his /
Christ at the Column" so Italian in