ey have left us, the
enumeration of those of the few Spaniards of whom we have any knowledge
awakens no such thrill, and if we have ever heard of them, their works
mean little more to us than their names. Only when we come within touch
of Velasquez does our interest awaken--as in the case of Ribera and
Zurbaran--and that is less because of them than because of Velasquez. El
Greco was not a Spaniard by birth, but a Cretan; and if he were ranged
with the Italians, to whom he more properly belongs, he would scarcely
be more famous than some Bolognese masters whose names are now--or
perhaps we ought to say, at the present moment--almost forgotten. The
announcement that one of his portraits has been sold to an American for
L30,000 is of commercial rather than of artistic interest.

If one had to sum up the career and the art of Velasquez in a sentence,
it might be done by calling him a Court painter who never flattered.
After recording his life from the time when he left his master Pacheco
to enter the service of Philip IV. to the day that he died in it, we
shall find that only a bare percentage of his work was not commissioned
by the king; and in all his pictures which were not simply portraits
there is little if anything to be found which is not as literal and
truthful a presentment of the model in front of him as the life-like
representations of Philip and those about his Court, of which the
supreme quality is that of living resemblance, or to put it in more
general terms, vivid realism. Gifted as he must have been with an
extraordinary vision and a still rarer, if not unique, ability to put
down on canvas what he saw, he confined himself entirely within the
limits of actuality, and thereby attained to heights which his great
contemporaries Rubens and Rembrandt in their noblest flights of
imagination never reached.

Velasquez was baptised on the 6th of June 1599, in the church of S.
Peter at Seville. He was the son of well-to-do parents; his father, a
native of Seville, was named Juan Rodriguez de Silva, his mother
Geronima Velasquez. At thirteen years old he had displayed so strong an
inclination towards painting that he was put to study under Francisco de
Herrera, then the most considerable painter in Spain (his son, also
Francisco, was the painter of the _Christ Disputing with the Doctors_,
in the National Gallery), but owing to Herrera's violent temper
Velasquez was shortly transferred to the studio of Francisco Pach