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Velasquez
by
“I can write well on any topic–all are alike to me!” said Dean Swift to Stella.
“Then write me an essay on a broomstick,” answered Stella.
And Swift wrote the essay–full of abstruse reasons, playful wit and charming insight.
The long, oval, dull face of Philip lured Velasquez. He analyzed every possible shade of emotion of which this man was capable, and stripped his soul bare. The sallow skin, thin curling locks, nerveless hands, and unmeaning eyes are upon the walls of every gallery of Christendom–matchless specimens of the power to sink self, and reveal the subject.
That is why Whistler is right when he says that Velasquez is the painters’ painter. “The Blacksmith” by Whistler shows you the blacksmith, not Whistler; Rembrandt’s pictures of his mother show the woman; Franz Hals gives you the Burgomaster, not himself. Shakespeare of all writers is the most impersonal–he does not give himself away.
When Rubens painted a portrait of Philip the Fourth he put a dash of daring, exuberant health in the face that was never there. The health and joy of life was in Rubens, and he could not keep it off his palette. There is a sameness in every Rubens, because the imagination of the man ran over, and falsified his colors; he always gives you a deal of Rubens.
But stay! that expression, “sinking self,” is only a figure of speech. At the last, the true artist never sinks self: he is always supreme, and towers above every subject, every object, that he portrays. The riotous health and good-cheer of Rubens marked the man’s limitations. He was not great enough to comprehend the small, the delicate, the insignificant and the absurd. Only a very great man can paint dwarfs, idiots, topers and kings. And so the many- sidedness of the great man continually deceives the world into thinking that he is the thing with which he associates; or, on the other hand, we say he “sinks self” for the time, whereas the truth is that in his own nature he comprehends the Whole. Shakespeare being the Universal Man, we lose him in the labyrinth of his winding and wondrous imagination. The greater comprehends the less.
The beginner paints what he sees; or, more properly, he paints what he thinks he sees. If he grows he will next paint what he imagines, as Rubens did. Then there is another stage which completes the spiral and comes back to the place of beginning, and the painter will again paint what he sees.
This Velasquez did, and this is what sets him apart. The difference between the last stage and the first is that the artist has learned to see.
To write is nothing–to know what to write is much. To paint is nothing–to see and know the object you are attempting to portray is everything.
“Shall I paint the thing just as I see it?” asked the ingenue of the great artist. “Why, yes,” was the answer, “provided you do not see the thing as you paint it.”
The King and the Painter grew old together. They met on a common ground of horses, dogs and art; and while the King used these things to kill time and cause him to forget self, the Painter found horses and dogs good for rest and recreation. But art was for Velasquez a religion, a sacred passion.
Nominally the Court Painter ranked with the Court Barber, and his allowance was the same. But Velasquez ruled the King, and the King knew it not. Like all wasteful, dissolute men, Philip the Fourth had spasms of repentance when he sought by absurd economy to atone for folly.
We are all familiar with individuals who will blow to the four winds good money, and much of it, on needless meat and drink for those who are neither hungry nor athirst, and take folks for a carriage-ride who should be abed, and then the next day buy a sandwich for dinner and walk a mile to save a five-cent carfare. Some of us have done these things; and so occasionally Philip would dole out money to buy canvas and complain of the size of it, and ask in injured tone how many pictures Velasquez had painted from that last bolt of cloth! But Velasquez was a diplomat and humored his liege; yet when the artist died, the administrator of his estate had to sue the State for a settlement, and it was ten years before the final amount due the artist was paid. After twenty years of devotion, Olivarez– outmatched by Richelieu in the game of statecraft–fell into disrepute and was dismissed from office. Monarchies, like republics, are ungrateful.