terms with Philip. Calderon wrote a treatise on the dignity of painting, and Velazquez, in his Surrender of Breda,' reproduces the spirit of Calderon's patriotic plays. The story that Velazquez introduced Calderon's head into this picture, even if only a legend, suggests that the two were friends. There is an authentic portrait of Calderon (attributed to Alfaro, but perhaps by Francisco Zarineña) at the Church of the Hospital of St. Peter at Madrid, taken when he was about sixty; and there also exists a contemporary description in verse of his appearance when younger, of which Mr. Norman Maccoll gives a translation in the preface to his 'Select Plays of Calderon.' We venture to make the suggestion that in the fine half-length Portrait of a Man' at Apsley House we possibly have a likeness of Calderon by Velazquez, painted about 1635, a date which would well suit both the style of treatment and the apparent age of the sitter. The evidence, so far as it goes, seems to us decidedly to favour this identification. The old belief that this picture was a portrait of Velazquez may have even grown out of the tradition that it was a portrait of some distinguished man after the name of Calderon had been forgotten. Not so very long ago the fine picture by Velazquez at the Prado representing a sculptor modelling the bust of Philip was universally believed to be the portrait of Alonzo Cano. It has now been identified, on the evidence of a portrait by Varela painted some twenty years earlier than the Velazquez picture, as the likeness of Martinez Montañes. Neither Martinez Montañes nor Calderon is mentioned by Palomino as having been painted by Velazquez.

The portraits of the two maids of honour in the Meninas' are so charming that the Court ladies must have been eager to sit to Velazquez. But his portraits of ladies are rare. Some, we know, have been lost. What has become of the lady of singular perfection' whom Palomino mentions, or of the Duchess of Chevreuse, who, according to the Madrid newsletter, was being painted by Velazquez in French costume early in 1638, or of the lady who sat to him at Zaragoza in 1642, and complained that he had not done justice to her point-lace collar ? We know nothing about the Lady 'with a Fan' in the Wallace collection. A still greater puzzle is the early portrait at the Prado, formerly called 'Juana Pacheco.' Is she personating a Sibyl or some character in poetry? No one has yet guessed the riddle. The charming Isabella of Bourbon, Philip's first wife, who died in 1644, seems to have been only twice painted by Velazquez;

she probably disliked him as being the protégé of Olivares. Her equestrian portrait at the Prado is a curious compound. The dress and the horse's trappings are by Bartolomé Gonzaga, and therefore earlier than 1627; the horse and landscape, by Velazquez, are of the date of Philip's equestrian portrait, about 1638; and the face, also by Velazquez, suggests an intermediate date, perhaps 1631, for the Queen appears to be less than thirty, and she was born in 1603. One would like to know what Velazquez thought of some of the jobs which royalty set him to do.

The custom of keeping dwarfs and jesters lingered on at most European courts into the seventeenth century-at Madrid perhaps longer than elsewhere. Dwarfs seem to have been kept much as we keep dogs, and in pictures are often associated with dogs. It is not quite certain whether the series of dwarf portraits at the Prado all belong to the same date, but Sir W. Armstrong ingeniously suggests that they were possibly painted towards the end of the second period, when Velazquez may have fallen into temporary unpopularity on account of his sympathy with the fallen Olivares. We know that Velazquez painted El Primo (The Cousin') at Fraga in 1644; the little man, who perhaps laid claim to royal descent, is represented as reading a large book with great dignity. The identification of this portrait with the name in the inventory turns on a minute point. It appears from a bundle of accounts that the Cousin' just about this time received a present of a black court suit, and it so happens that this is the only dwarf in the series dressed in black. Velazquez probably felt no repugnance in painting dwarfs and imbeciles. Without having that love of the grotesque and the abnormal which led Leonardo and Albert Dürer to draw freaks and caricatures, he probably felt it stimulating to have to make ugliness attractive by the sheer force and sincerity of the presentation. If he painted an ugly queen and an ugly Pope, why not an ugly dwarf? His jesters, or 'men of pleasure,' as they were called at the Spanish Court, are even more magnificently painted than the dwarfs, especially the Don Juan of Austria,' in which the haggard-looking buffoon is dressed up as a sort of parody of the hero of Lepanto, Philip IV.'s great-uncle. Nothing could give one a better idea of the frivolous tone of the Court than the ridicule thus cast on a great historical name-a name, too, which was borne by Philip's IV.'s own natural son. But the blame for this does not rest with Velazquez, whose work

in this picture is delightful, the black velvet of the doublet, cloak, and hat being charmingly relieved by varying tones of pink and crimson. It is painted very slightly with a very wet brush, almost producing the impression of a watercolour. There can be little doubt that it belongs to the third period.

The second visit to Italy (1649-1651) could hardly have meant as much to Velazquez in point of artistic stimulus as did the first. Yet, in spite of time spent on the purchase of pictures and casts and the engagement of decorators for Philip, Italy again exerted an influence on him which we trace in the pictures of the third period. To get his hand in before painting Innocent X. at Rome, he did a portrait of his servant model, Juan de Pareja. Though Velazquez did not know it at this time, Pareja, by watching his master, had already made himself a very fair painter, and a certain haughtiness in his pose and look seems to hint at his secret. The Pope's portrait now at the Doria Palace, of which the Apsley House half-length is perhaps the repetition mentioned by Palomino, is of extraordinary force: crafty, suspicious, coarse, masterful, the face repels and fascinates. Troppo vero' was the comment of his Holiness when he saw the picture. His ugliness was proverbial. While he was still cardinal, Guido, resenting a reproof from him, is said to have given his features to the Satan writhing under St. Michael.

As early as February 1650 Philip had become impatient for the return of Velazquez. You know his phlegmatic 'disposition,' he writes to the Spanish ambassador at Rome; 'do not let him prolong his stay. I am having him told not 'to return by land; that would delay him, his character being what it is.' Philip wanted a portrait of his bride. He had married in 1649 his niece Mariana of Austria, Balthazar Carlos, to whom she was betrothed, having died in 1646. Mariana was a thoughtless girl, without either the good sense or good looks of Isabella of Bourbon, and it is pathetic to see the fretfulness of expression which becomes more and more strongly marked in her successive portraits. Her eldest child, the Infanta Margarita, was born in 1651. The Louvre and the Vienna Galleries both possess charming portraits of her, but most charming of all is the one at the Prado, formerly called in errorMaria Theresa.' The face has perhaps been repainted, but the figure in its pink and silver dress is one of the brightest bits of colouring which Velazquez ever produced.

'No pupil,' says Stevenson, 'touched the smallest accessory of this extraordinary costume; lace, ruffles, embroidery, every inch of the dress is painted by Velazquez with a running slippery touch which appears careless near at hand, but which at the focus gives colour, pattern, sparkle, and underlying form with the utmost precision and completeness.'

Margarita is also the central figure in the picture of the 'Maids of Honour' ('Las Meninas'), painted in 1655, in which Velazquez has introduced himself at the easel in the act of painting the King's portrait. The scene is interesting; but still more interesting are the composition and execution, which give this work its unique character. More than onehalf of the picture is empty space, containing nothing except the upper part of the large canvas on the easel and the faint receding lines of ceiling and wall-empty, yet at the same time full, full of atmosphere, which is modelled in perspective as it goes back from the eye and extends into depth and darkness. The light and shade effects at the top of the picture are so wonderfully managed that, if we cover over its lower half, and so debar ourselves from the help given to the eye by the retreating planes of figures, we still get a perfect impression of a long gallery, full of mysterious gloom, seen through the veil of strong light which enters by the nearest window, and modified by the dimmer light which comes in through the door and furthest window. How is the optical delusion produced? Any one who could fully answer this question would be as great a painter as Velazquez. When we go close up we see nothing but thin smears of paint, put on apparently with great haste and carelessness. Stand back to the right distance and the whole scene quivers in a translucent atmosphere. It is as if the painter's brush had stamped upon the canvas a vibrating ray of light which gives the illusion of reality. "Las Meninas," says Stevenson, even when subject to the test of contrast with real people sitting on a bench before it, preserves its appearance of truth and natural vigour. Its colour relations continue to look as subtle and as naturally complex as before; and when you look at both nature and the picture your eye only seems to pass from one room into another.'

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The picture of the Spinners' (Las Hilanderas '), probably a little later than the Meninas,' is its complement. Here again Velazquez is painting light and air; but whereas in the 'Meninas' we look through a veil of light into gloom, in the Hilanderas' we look through gloom into a softened sunlight in which we almost see the floating

motes. The richer colouring of the 'Hilanderas' and the exquisitely graceful figure of the young girl in the foreground make it to some people more attractive than the Meninas.' 'Painted by pure will,' said Raphael Mengs, who, though an inferior painter, had a critic's eye.

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Of the pictures of the third period we possess only two examples in England, Mr. Morritt's 'Venus' and the 'Philip 'Old' of the National Gallery. The 'Venus,' which Stevenson considers the only picture not in the Prado that is essential 'to the full understanding of the painter's art,' is unfortunately somewhat inaccessible to English students; but a careful study of the National Gallery half-length reveals the power which Velazquez had acquired of modelling a face in light without leaving a trace of the apparently instantaneous process by which it was done. In this unpretending yet masterly work we see, says Stevenson, 'on a smaller scale the large, soft style of brushing used in "Menippus," ""Las Meninas," &c.,' though the treatment of the black dress does not show to the same extent as in the 'Menippus or the Philip Old' of the Prado, that wonderful play of light on dark surfaces which makes Velazquezas subtle a colourist as light itself;' so that, whereas a painter like El Greco opens a pit or hole of black asphalt, Velazquez 'flashes the blacks of Menippus with a hundred nuances of 'greenish light.' For a full perception of his power of seeing the finest shades of distinction in silvery neutral tones and in blacks and whites it is still necessary to go to the Prado. Velazquez was never a colourist in the ordinary sense of the term; he never loved colour for its own sake. In the pictures of the third period he, on the whole, with some striking exceptions, restricts himself to a narrower scale of colour than he had used before, but for that very reason his command of 'values' becomes more complete. His sense of gradation of tone seems to become as instinctive as his modelling and brushwork in these latest years. The thin smear of paint is put on with such consummate art that for the most part there is hardly even an appearance of brush strokes. His control over the instruments of expres 'sion,' says a critic, is absolute and effortless.' We see, indeed, his repentirs, his occasional corrections of outline in his earlier work, his additions of strips to his canvas in some of his latest compositions, and yet the completed picture does not give the slightest impression of hesitation between conception and execution. Hand seems to wait upon thought unerringly, instinctively, instantaneously.