f form, space, colour, and
rhythm has the unpremeditated quality of life; yet the massive
harmonic grandeurs of Las Meninas have been placed by certain critics
in the category of glorified genre.

Some prefer Las Hilanderas in the outer gallery. After the stately
equestrian series, the Philip, the Olivares, the Baltasar Carlos;
after the bust portraits of Philip in the Prado and in the National
Gallery, the hunting series; after the Crucifixion and its sombre
background, you return to The Spinners and wonder anew. Its subtitle
might be: Variations on the Theme of Sunshine. In it the painter
pursues the coloured adventures of a ray of light. Rhythmically more
involved and contrapuntal than The Maids, this canvas, with its
brilliant broken lights, its air that circulates, its tender yet
potent conducting of the eye from the rounded arm of the seductive
girl at the loom to the arched area with its leaning, old-time
bass-viol, its human figures melting dream-like into the tapestried
background, arouses within the spectator much more complicated _etats
d'ame_ than does Las Meninas. The silvery sorceries of that picture
soothe the spirit and pose no riddles; The Spinners is a cathedral
crammed with implications. Is it not the last word of the art of
Velasquez--though it preceded The Maids? Will the eye ever tire of its
glorious gloom, its core of tonal richness, its virile exaltation of
everyday existence? Is it only a trick of the wrist, a deft blending
of colours by this artist, who has been called, wrongfully--the
"Shakespeare of the brush"? Is all this nothing more than
"distinguished"?

Mr. Ricketts justly calls Las Lanzas the unique historic picture.
Painted at the very flush of his genius, painted with sympathy for the
conquered and the conqueror--Velasquez accompanied the Marquis of
Spinola to Italy--this Surrender of Breda has received the homage of
many generations. Sir Joshua Reynolds asserted that the greatest
picture at Rome was the Velasquez head of Pope Innocent X in the Doria
Palace (a variant is in the Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg). What
would he have said in the presence of this captivating evocation of a
historic event? The battle pieces of Michael Angelo, Da Vinci, and
Titian are destroyed; Las Lanzas remains a testimony to the powers of
imaginative reconstruction and architectonic of Velasquez. It is the
most complete, the most natural picture in the world. The rhythms of
the bristling lances are