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Yet they appeal to different temperaments, not readily combined, and critics may be roughly distinguished as pictorial or historical. The pictorial critic views the master as detached from all environment, as existing in space. seeks to discover from the pictures themselves the secret of their production. He dissects composition and technique— colour, modelling, and brush-work. The length of a brushsweep will perhaps decide between an original and a copy; the way in which the paint is put on may determine the period to which the picture belongs. Great claims have been put forward of late years on behalf of this kind of evidence. The unconscious tricks and mannerisms of a painter have been supposed to supply an infallible means of dealing with questions of authenticity; the drawing of a thumb-nail, the treatment of a curl is considered decisive. But there is reason to think that Morelli's principles are in danger of being pressed too far. In the case of conventional and highly mannered work the method has no doubt yielded considerable results. But if the painter has no mannerisms, what then? We are not surprised to learn that the attempts which have been made to fix this 'measuring apparatus' on the pictures of Velazquez have broken down. In saying this we are far from meaning to undervalue the importance of the trained eye of the expert. It is to this trained eye and trained judgement that we must look not merely for decisions on genuineness, but for the solution of still higher problems the inner meaning of a great picture, for instance, as it presented itself to the painterwhat it is which differentiates it from other pictures, and its painter from other masters. There is always, perhaps, some little danger that picture criticism may tend to sink too entirely into a mere picture-dealer's discussion of genuineness. On the other hand when we turn to the historical critic we find that he studies not so much the pictures as the conditions under which they were produced: he ransacks archives for diaries, letters, bundles of accounts; he makes himself acquainted with the costumes, the manners, the leading personages of the age, and thus constructs an historical background into which he endeavours to fit the series of pictures. All the accessories of a picture are to him of the utmost importance-costume, features, pose, details of scene. Light may thus be thrown. upon the time and place at which a picture was painted; the anachronism of a false attribution may be exposed, or the subject of an unknown portrait suggested. A knowledge of

the master's character and of his relations to his contemporaries may help to determine the meaning of his work-his reasons, for instance, for choosing a particular subject, his central idea in a composition, the emotional or dramatic force, or, again, the limitation in range of expression which a picture displays. The historical critic presents the master as a living historical figure, and charges his work with human interest; yet it may be doubted whether he really penetrates to the centre of his artistic personality. He knows all about him, but does he know him?

Two books on Velazquez, published within the last twelve years, strikingly illustrate these two opposite critical temperaments. Professor Carl Justi is an excellent example of the historical critic. His work is a monument of research, a storehouse of information, and although it will be (and, indeed, already has been) supplemented and modified by later investigation it supplies a background to Velazquez the main features of which are not likely to be much altered. But it has the defects of its qualities. It lacks the power of combining its multitudinous details into an organic whole. The central figure is overlain by a multiplicity of touches and does not stand out clearly. The criticism of the pictures, when it passes beyond a study of the accessories, is apt to be dry and pedantic. The book is a hortus siccus. It will continue to supply materials to students, but it will not live as itself a study. Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson, whose recent untimely death all lovers of Velazquez deplore, is a critic of the opposite school. A few pages, based on Justi's work, are all that he thinks it necessary to devote to historical setting. The pictures with him are all in all, though he takes little trouble in discussing questions of genuineness, and still less in tracing the evolution of Velazquez through the three periods of his art. Stevenson's main object is to point out that the highest work of Velazquez exhibits one central characteristic unity of impression. Velazquez is an impressionist-i.e. his greatest pictures represent the impression of a scene as an harmonious whole, and not an aggregation of separately studied parts. Impressionism is, of course, only one form of realism. Velazquez was always a realist, but his earlier works-the Borrachos,' for instance exhibit a piecemeal realism,' each part of the picture being presented as forcibly as possible without any consideration of the ensemble. He became an impressionist slowly by appreciating more and more what painters call 'value,' i.e. the relation of one tone or colour to another.

Colour is not absolute, not inherent, but is modified by each bit of surrounding colour, by the light and atmosphere in which it is viewed, and by its inclination to the source of light. Thus the atmospheric effect gives the keynote of the picture, and as the keynote varies so will the scale of values vary. It was only towards the end of his life that Velazquez acquired his full command of values, and it is, therefore, the latest pictures which especially interest Stevenson. His enthusiasm for these is so great as sometimes to lead him into hyperbole: e.g., 'One feels that the portrait goes 'beyond human powers in the intimacy of its modelling.' Whatever view may be taken of the truth of the theory which regards Velazquez as a modern painter born before his time, the insight of Stevenson's analysis is incontestable. It is impossible, indeed, to do justice to his suggestive book in a few lines. It will stimulate students for a long time to

come.

Stevenson calls Velazquez an explosion of personality, 'as disconnected with the art that immediately followed him as with that which preceded him.' In Sir Walter Armstrong's interesting book we see the pendulum swinging in the contrary direction.

'Not only had Velazquez precedents for everything he did, not only was his finest work anticipated, in intention, by many an inferior master, both in Italy and in his own native country, but he himself was rather slow than prompt to take example by the best of what had already been done.'

We must confess that this seems to us a little sweeping, even though qualified by the words which we have ventured to italicise. But the hard common sense which Sir W. Armstrong brings to bear upon Velazquez is not without its use as a corrective of much ill-directed enthusiasm. His book is eminently practical. In his chronology of the pictures he has made a real advance, and his free use of Mazo and other pupils, as accounting for much that now passes under the name of Velazquez, has met with general acceptance, though opinions differ, of course, about particular pictures. The division of the work into two nearly equal parts, dealing respectively with the life and the art, if it involves some repetition, serves to emphasise the equal importance of picture-criticism and historical study. The latest authority on Velazquez, Señor de Beruete, a Spanish artist who writes in French, has reverted to the older and simpler arrangement, interweaving discussion of the pictures with the biographical narrative. He carries the chronology

of the pictures into greater fulness of detail than has before been attempted, exhibiting a happy mixture of ingenuity and sound judgement in the process. For the historical setting he makes good use of Señor Cruzada Villaamil's privately printed Annals of the Life and Works ' of Velazquez,' and has also had access to documents not yet printed. There is a good deal of new and interesting material, for instance, in the account of the difficulties which delayed the appointment of Velazquez as a Knight of Santiago. Like Sir W. Armstrong, whose véritable esprit d'indépendance' he highly appreciates, Señor de Beruete pays much attention to questions of genuineness. We will refer later to one or two of his conclusions. The work is commended to the French reader by M. Léon Bonnat and is magnificently illustrated. It is pleasant to think that the beginning of the twentieth century finds the last word on Velazquez for the moment in, the possession of so worthy a successor of Palomino.

To the student of the earliest work of Velazquez London is more important than Madrid. The Prado Museum contains, it is true, the 'Adoration of the Kings' (dated 1619), which is of historical importance as showing the influence of Pacheco; for its composition almost exactly follows the rules which Pacheco lays down in his Art of Painting' for the treatment of this subject. But the real interest of the young Velazquez at this time undoubtedly lay in the painting of what were called bodegones-tavern scenes or still-life pieces, with a figure or two introduced. Two of these bodegones are at Apsley House, one in Sir Francis Cook's collection at Richmond, and a fourth at the National Gallery. Pacheco tells us that Velazquez used to keep a little peasant lad as apprentice, whom he had hired to serve as a model in different attitudes; and it is difficult to resist the belief that we have in more than one of the surviving early works a representation of this young model. The boy in Sir F. Cook's Old Woman and Omelette,' the page in the 'Adoration of the Kings,' and the lad in the Waterseller' at Apsley House are all from the same model, just as the old woman who is making the omelette reappears in the 'Christ at the House of Martha' in the National Gallery. A comparison leads to the conclusion that the Waterseller' is the latest, as it is certainly the best, of these early works; its date must be about 1621. The educational value of the bodegones is recognised even by Pacheco, who, in spite of

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his own leanings towards the Italian school, tells us that bodegones ought not to be despised, since it was to them and to portraits that his son-in-law owed his having found the true method of imitating nature. But why, we ask, should he have begun with this kind of nature? Why the rags and wrinkles, the pots and pans, the squalid interiors? In this, as in his reaction against Italian conventionalism, Velazquez was the child of his age. There was a movement in the direction of realistic representation of low life, which we see not merely in the work of the rising Dutch school, but also in the Spanish literature of the time. Any one wishing to represent the adventures of Don Quixote, says Justi, 'would have found models to his hand in these bodegones.' The two parts of Don Quixote' appeared in 1605 and 1614, and the Novelas Exemplares' in 1613. Picaresque ' literature, illustrating the adventures of the vagabonds then swarming in Spain, abounded during the early years of the seventeenth century, and in 1629 Velazquez gives us in his 'Borrachos a magnificent study of rogues and beggars. Sir W. Armstrong thinks that 'Pacheco is clearly respon'sible for the clumsy design and tame smoothness of execution we see in the bodegones.' Our own study of Pacheco's work and of the bodegones leads us to a different conclusion. But, be this as it may, we desire to enter a general protest against the extreme lengths to which the idea of influence' has been pressed in the case of Velazquez. Critics, it seems to us, have wasted much time in endeavouring to trace the influence exercised on him by Herrera, Pacheco, Tristan, El Greco, Rubens, Tintoret, and Guido. The truth is that the direct influence of individuals on genius is rarely traceable to any great extent. The great painter and the great poet are, of course, the children of their generation; with a different environment their growth would have been different. But there seems to be something inevitable and irresistible in their developement. The great artist draws in the ideas which are floating around him, and gives them a new meaning and vitality. The second-rate man is the pupil of this or that master. The great man is his own master.

It was as a portrait painter that Velazquez was summoned to the Court of the young Philip IV. His portraiture is the foundation of his artistic excellence, the central point from which the rest of his work radiates. In many of his compositions the portrait element is strongly marked, and in all of them he treats his models as sitters. His chief