them in advance ancestral portraits to hang up, with their arms
blazoned on the corner of the canvas, in the galleries of old castles.
No one has known so well as Velasquez how to paint the gentleman with
such superb familiarity, and, so to speak, as equal to equal. He is by
no means a poor, embarrassed artist who only sees his models while they
are posing and has never lived with them. He follows them in the privacy
of the royal apartments, on great hunting-parties, and in ceremonies of
pomp. He knows their bearing, their gestures, their attitudes, and their
physiognomy; he himself is one of the King's favourites (_privados del
rey_). Like themselves, and even more than they, he has _les grandes
et les petites entrees_.[20] The nobility of Spain having Velasquez for
a portrait-painter could not say, like the lion of the fable: "Ah! if
the lions only knew how to paint."

[Illustration: THE SURRENDER OF BREDA.
_Velasquez_.]

Velasquez takes his place naturally between Titian and Van Dyck as a
painter of portraits. His colour is solidly and profoundly harmonious,
without any false luxury and with no need of glitter. His magnificence
is that of ancient hereditary fortunes. It has tranquillity, equality,
and intimacy. We find no violent reds, greens, nor blues, no upstart
glitter, no brilliant gew-gaws. All is restrained and subdued, but with
a warm tone like that of old gold, or with a grey tone like the dead
sheen of family silver. Gaudy and loud things will do for upstarts, but
Don Diego Velasquez de Silva is too true a gentleman to make himself an
object of remark in that manner, and, let us say, too good a painter
also. Although a realist, he brings to his art a lofty grandeur, a
disdain of useless detail, and an intentional sacrifice that plainly
reveal the sovereign master. These sacrifices were not always those that
another painter would have made. Velasquez chose to put in evidence
what, it sometimes seems, should have been left in shadow. He
extinguishes and he illuminates with apparent caprice, but the effect
always justifies him.

The correctness of his eye was such that while he only pretended to be
copying, he brought the soul to the surface and painted the inner and
the outer man at the same time. His portraits relate the secret
_Memoires_ of the Spanish court better than all the chroniclers. Let him
represent them in gala dress, riding their genets, in hunting-costume,
an arquebuse in their hand,