s nor his
station at all matched the service he rendered to his sovereign. As
the years went on he was paid a little better, but his days and hours
were more and more taken up with duties at Court, and his salary was
always in arrears. He could not even reserve his own private time for
his art, but as he waxed higher in the estimation of the King, the
supervision of Court ceremonies, entrusted to him as an honour,
deprived him of leisure, and at last brought his life prematurely to
a close.

From the time when Velasquez entered the service of the King, he painted
exclusively for the Court. We have eight portraits by him of Philip
IV., and five of the little Don Carlos, besides many others of the
queens and princesses. We can follow the growth of his art in the
portraits of Philip IV., as we can follow that of Rembrandt in portraits
of himself. But while Rembrandt might make of the same person, himself,
or another model, a dozen different people, so that it mattered little
who the model was, Velasquez was concerned with a different problem.
In the seventeenth century almost any good painter could draw his
models correctly, but Velasquez reproduced the living aspect of a man
as no one else had done. We have already spoken of the feeling of
atmosphere that Cuyp and Peter de Hoogh were able to bring into their
pictures. Velasquez, knowing little or nothing of the contemporary
Dutchmen, worked at the same art problems all his life, and at last
mastered the atmosphere problem completely, whether it was the air
of a closed room in the dark palace of Philip, or the air of the open
country, as in our picture. In this there is no bright light except
upon the face of the little prince. It is dark and gloomy weather,
but if on such a day you were to see the canvas in the open air it
would almost seem part of the country itself, as Velasquez's picture
of a room seems part of the gallery in which it hangs.

It was only by degrees that he attained this quality in his work. He
had had the ordinary teaching of a painter in Spain, but the level
of art there at the time was not so high as in Holland or Italy. Like
Rembrandt he was to a great extent his own master. In his early years
he painted pictures of middle-class life, in which each figure is
truthfully depicted, as were the early heads in Rembrandt's 'Anatomy.'
Like Rembrandt in his youth, he looked at each head separately and
painted it as faithfully as he could. The higher art o