ave done,
and has given us so chaste and beautiful a realisation of the goddess.
Having regard to the scepticism with which this masterpiece was received
in England at the time of its purchase for the nation it is worth
quoting Senor Beruete's remarks upon it in that connection. "The
authenticity of this work," he writes "has found numerous doubters in
Spain, less on account of its subject--being the only nude female figure
in the whole _oeuvre_ of Velasquez--than because so few people ever
suspected its existence; but after it was exhibited at Manchester in
1857 and in London in 1890, it was recognised that its attribution to
Velasquez was well founded. At the sight of the canvas all doubt
vanishes. There, indeed, is the style, the inimitable technique of
Velasquez."

This, from the connoisseur who has devoted years of study to the work of
the master, and who rejects such well established examples as the
Dulwich _Philip IV._ and the _Admiral Pulido Pareja_, is surely more
conclusive than the academic pedantry of ignorance masquerading as
authority.

* * * * *

BARTOLOME ESTEBAN MURILLO (1617-1682) has always been accounted the most
popular of the Spanish painters, and it is only in recent times that his
popularity has faded into comparative insignificance on the fuller
recognition and understanding of the genius of Velasquez. The intensely
Anglican feeling in this country during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries

[Illustration: PLATE XIX.--VELAZQUEZ

THE ROKEBY VENUS

_National Gallery, London_]

seems to have found peculiar relief in the sentimental aspirations of
the followers of Raphael in the rendering of religious subjects from the
Romish point of view. At the present time we are readier to estimate
Murillo's justly high place in the annals of painting by such a picture
as his own portrait, lent by Lord Spencer to the recent Exhibition, than
to allow it on the strength of our recollection of the Madonnas and Holy
Families, Immaculate Conceptions and Assumptions, of which there exist
so many copies in the dining rooms of country rectories. The _Boy
Drinking_, which is here reproduced, if it is the least "important" of
the four examples in the National Gallery, is certainly not the least
excellent.

From the miserable state into which Spain had fallen by the end of the
seventeenth century, it could hardly be expected that anything further
in the nature of art would re