palaces of Spain and cannot be traced. This critic, Senor Don
Aureliano de Beruete--a connoisseur, a collector, and a worker in the
best interests of art--is perhaps a little too severe. He will not
admit to his catalogue a portrait like that of Admiral Adriano Pulido
Pareja, which, despite some inferior workmanship, can show considerable
claims to be regarded as genuine; but even if all the disputed ones
were admitted, and such a list as the late R. A. M. Stevenson published
were accepted without that far-seeing critic's own reserve, we should
not have as many pictures to represent the forty years of the artist's
life as Sir Joshua Reynolds was known to paint in a single year.
Velazquez has left very few drawings, and these are of small
importance; there are but two acknowledged engravings; and to limit
still further our sources of knowledge, the artist's correspondence
seems to have been lost; while the Memoirs which Velazquez was said to
have drawn up when Philip IV. sent the pictures to the Escorial are now
admitted by the best authorities to be the work of another man.

I

THE METHOD AND INFLUENCE OF VELAZQUEZ

In dealing with the life and work of the Spanish master, even in the
modest fashion of this little monograph, one must bear in mind the fact
that Velazquez, in the eyes of his contemporaries, was not only an
artist--he was a court painter; and pictures other than portraits were
of comparatively little importance to Philip IV. and his circle. Art
borrowed most of her importance in sixteenth and seventeenth century
Spain from the fact that she was the handmaid of Holy Mother Church.
Velazquez was a court official who chanced to be a clever
portrait-painter, and his promotion tended ever to take him further
away from his art. With the increase of state duties the claims upon
his time grew more and more difficult to meet, and, when he rose in the
closing years of his life to be Grand Marshal of the Palace, entrusted
with the ordering of state functions and missions to distinguished
foreigners, his art became entirely a secondary consideration. The
studio was no more than a place of refuge for the artist in the hours
when he might forget that he was an official. If Velazquez had not
been compelled to sacrifice the best part of forty years' activity to
the ridiculous formalities of court life, the world might have been
richer to-day by scores of pictures worthy to rank by the side of "Las
Meninas"