e seldom are able to express
them in our literature. In our art, on the other hand, especially in our
landscape art, we manage to translate our subtlest emotion. We are able
to suggest what is too delicate for analysis, and in this we stand
almost alone in the painting of the present day.

TWO SPANISH PAINTERS

XII

TWO SPANISH PAINTERS

Modern art, particularly American art, owes much to Velasquez and
something to Goya, and modern painters have been prompt to acknowledge
their indebtedness. But there has been a prevailing impression that with
Goya's rich and unique achievement Spanish art stopped in its own
country so completely as to be incapable of revival. The impression was
disturbed in this country by the appearance in the galleries of the
Hispanic Museum in New York, and also in Buffalo and in Boston, of the
work of two modern Spaniards, one a painter who demonstrated by his
methods and choice of subjects that the old Spanish traditions and
ideals had not been forgotten, the other a singularly isolated
individual who illumined for us a side of Spanish life which art
previously had ignored. Both spoke a racy idiom and conveyed a sense of
quickened vitality by freedom of gesture, unhackneyed arrangement,
intensity of color, reality of type, yet in their influence upon the
public they were as far as might be asunder.

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida was born at Valencia, Spain, in 1863, and
began seriously to study art at the age of fifteen. He studied at the
Academy of his birthplace for several years and won there a scholarship
entitling him to a period of study in Italy. He visited Paris also,
where he was profoundly impressed, it is said, by two exhibitions in the
French capital, one of the work of Bastien LePage, the other of the work
of the German Menzel. The modern note is clearly felt in all his later
painting, but certainly not the influence of either Bastien LePage or
Menzel. The painter to whom he bears the most marked resemblance is
Botticelli. The spiritual languor, the melancholy sentiment, the
mystical tendency, the curiosity and interest in the unseen which are
important characteristics of the Florentine who read his Dante to such
good purpose do not appear in the work of this frank and lusty
Valencian, but where else in modern painting do we find the gracile
forms, the supple muscles, the buoyancy of carriage, the light
impetuosity of movement, and the draperies blown into the shapes o