Identifier: greatpicturesassx00sing (find matches)
Title: Great pictures, as seen and described by famous writers
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: Singleton, Esther, d. 1930, ed. and tr
Subjects: Painting
Publisher: New York : Dodd, Mead and Company
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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pride of race, and familiarity with great events. These personages would have noneed to bring proofs for their admittance into the orders of Santiago and Calatrava. Their bearing would admit them, so unmistakably are they hidalgos. Their long hair, theirturned-up moustaches, their pointed beards, their steel gorgets, their corselets or their buff doublets render them inadvance 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 Kings favourites (privados del rey). Like
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THE SURRENDER OF BREDA 193 themselves, and even more than they, he has les grandes et les petites entrees.1 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. 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

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