Meanwhile The Surrender of Breda continued to hang in Madrid. It never went far. It had been listed among the pictures in the Retiro palace in 1702, valued at five hundred doubloons. By 1772 it was in “the new palace”—Justi’s term, presumably the eighteenth-century Palacio Real that had replaced the Alcázar and stood on the west side of the city, its east front facing the Plaza de Oriente—but by then the painting seemed to have lost some of its original bearings. Antonio Ponz, a Spanish art historian and guidebook writer, thought in 1775–76 that the hero of the Breda was the Marquis of Pescara. Ponz’s contemporary Anton Rafael Mengs, who knew little about the painting’s subject other than that it represented the capitulation of a fortress after a siege, believed the successful general was the Marquis of Leganes, Spinola’s son-in-law and a kinsman of Olivares. At this stage the taxable value of the painting had increased to 120,000 reals. A little later the British traveler Richard Ford, a Devonshire gentleman who toured Spain on horseback in the early 1830s and whose vigorous handbooks on relatively unknown Spain were much read in the mid-nineteenth century, said that The Surrender of Breda was perhaps Velázquez’s finest picture: “Never were knights, soldiers or national character better painted, or the heavy Fleming, the intellectual Italian, and the proud Spaniard more nicely marked, even to their boots and breeches; the lances of the guard actually vibrate.” Constable’s friend and biographer the Anglo-American painter Charles Leslie wrote about the thrill of coming on Velázquez and delight in the Breda in his Handbook for Young Painters (1855). Although he hadn’t seen the picture in the flesh, only in reproductions, Leslie thought it testified to Velázquez’s great dramatic powers. Leslie was moved by the way in which Velázquez showed Spinola’s reluctance to take the keys of Breda from Justin. Spinola, he wrote, would not allow his recent antagonist to kneel but rather, “laying his hand gently on his shoulder, he seems to say, ‘fortune has favoured me, but our cases might have been reversed.’ To paint such an act of generous courtesy was worthy of a contemporary of Cervantes.” However, Leslie then felt the need to acknowledge the natural hidalgo in Velázquez. “It is not,” Leslie writes, “in the choice of subject, but in the manner in which he has brought the scene before our eyes, that the genius and mind of Velázquez are shown. The cordial unaffected bearing of the conqueror could only have been represented by as thorough a gentleman as himself.” And Leslie notes that Richard Ford—affected by the same chivalrous inclination—had observed that the gentleman painter “had introduced his own noble head into this picture, which is placed in the corner with a plumed hat.”
A less sedate afterlife than the Breda’s has been that of the Venus with a Mirror. By 1800 the Venus had passed from the de Haro/Guzmáns to the collection of the dukes of Alba. It was believed to have been a fond possession of the Duchess of Alba, and possibly therefore to have influenced the painting by Goya, the duchess’s lover, of his two Majas, one naked and one clothed. William Buchanan’s agent George Wallis got his hands on it in Madrid in 1808, and Buchanan brought it to England in 1813; it was sold the following year to John Morritt of Rokeby Hall in Yorkshire. Sir Thomas Lawrence, the celebrated portrait painter, had advised Morritt to buy it. Morritt was a classical scholar, a member of parliament, and a friend of the historical novelist Sir Walter Scott. After Velázquez’s nude arrived at Rokeby Hall, Morritt wrote to Scott:
I have been all morning pulling about my pictures and hanging them in new positions to make room for my fine picture of Venus’s backside which I have at length exalted over my chimney-piece in the library. It is an admirable light for the painting and shows it to perfection, whilst raising the said backside to a considerable height, the ladies may avert their downcast eyes without difficulty and connoisseurs steal a glance without drawing the said posterior into the company.
Since 1906 Venus’s backside has been on public view in London, yet has continued to make difficulty for some of its viewers, their responses tugged between love, lust, embarrassment, and even—for a few—disgust. Velázquez’s Venus doesn’t exactly titilate today’s hardened audience, but many earlier male viewers thought she was sexually exciting—and women assumed that men got an illicit frisson from looking at “the said backside.” The Venus’s very existence in seventeenth-century Spain, in what Kenneth Clark called “the prudish and corsetted court of Philip IV,” seemed to unleash, as in recoil, all sorts of fantasies. Although to Clark’s mind “a dispassionate work,” she nevertheless prompted passionate acts. The Venus was acquired from the Morritt family by the London dealers Agnews in 1905. There were patriotic concerns that the painting was on its way to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, to the Louvre in Paris, or to a robber baron collector in the United States, and thirty thousand people went to Agnews to see it. The asking price of £45,000 needed to buy it for the National Gallery had to be raised. But the National Art Collections Fund drummed up support. Henry James and Roger Fry were among the many who dug deep into their pockets, as did King Edward VII, no prude, whose at-the-time last minute anonymous donation saved the Venus for the British nation.
At the National Gallery in London in March 1914, a few months before the declaration of war with Germany, a woman named Mary Richardson, armed with a meat cleaver, attacked the painting, slashing the beautiful buttocks. Ms. Richardson was a suffragette, a drum major in the militant organization’s fife-and-drum marching band. She was dedicated to the excellent cause of gaining the right to vote for women, but she acted, she said, because “she hated the way men gawped at the Venus.” Possibly, as some have suggested, sexual frustration was involved; perhaps, too, there was an element of simple power hunger behind her action. “Slasher” Richardson became in 1934 the head of the women’s section of the British Union of Fascists. Before then the painting had received the expert attentions of Helmut Ruhemann, German-born chief restorer of the National Gallery, and today it looks completely unscarred. It is however now protected by shatterproof glass, and the gallery guards keep a cautious eye on visitors who dawdle for a suspiciously long time in front of the picture.
* * *
AN ANGLO-SAXON ATTACHMENT to and even acquisitiveness for Velázquez was matched in the mid-nineteenth century by the French. Indeed, the French infiltrated and took over the British liking for the Spaniard’s art in such a way that they came to seem to have been there first. In 1688 André Félibien, the French architect, antiquarian, friend of Poussin, and writer on painting, had called Velázquez an “unknown.” The Louvre had originally hung Velázquez in galleries marked “Italian School” but a Galerie Espagnole was established in the Louvre in 1838 by King Louis-Philippe, with some four hundred Spanish paintings acquired by his agents, Baron Taylor and the artist Adrien Dauzats, many of the works being bought for little and smuggled into France. Interest in Spanish painting was thereafter stimulated among French writers—Thoré, Taine, Michel, Baudelaire, and Faure, among others. Thoré in 1857 called Velázquez one of the supreme artists of all time and Faure found in him “a brother to Beethoven.” Théophile Gautier, also a critic, famously asked of Las Meninas, “Where is the painting?” Moreover, French artists, Degas and Courbet among them, found much to marvel at in Velázquez’s work. The world seemed to have changed in a way that took account of his art’s complexity. One can say that above all it was other artists who saw the many dimensioned depths of his artistry and responded: They saw that Velázquez was among the truly great. The wait for worldwide fame had gone on long enough.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, three painters from three countries took an exceptional interest in Velázquez: Vincent van Gogh (1853–90); Edouard Manet (1832–83), who frequently turned to Velázquez for inspiration and often used Velázquez’s subjects as his own; and James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). Manet, writing to Henri Fantin-Latour, described Velázquez as “the painter of painters,” and announced to Baudelaire, “At last I’ve really come to know Velázquez and I tell you he’s the greatest artist there has ever been.… He’s greater tha
n his reputation and compensates all by himself for the fatigue and problems that are inevitable on a journey in Spain.” Manet paid homage to Velázquez in a number of pictures including an oil showing Velázquez painting. The empress Eugenie, Napoleon III’s wife, was a Spaniard—she had been the Countess de Teba—and Paris was then full of everything Spanish, singers, dancers, and musicians such as the renowned guitarist Huerta. Manet’s Le Guitarrero won an award at the salon in 1861. He wanted his mirror painting, The Bar at the Folies-Bergère, to be hung one day between a Titian and Velázquez’s Spinners, The Fable of Arachne. Bizet’s opera Carmen opened in Paris in 1875, based on the 1845 novella by Prosper Merimée, and after a shaky start proceeded to become one of the most popular operas of all time, throwing a melodramatic light on Seville and Spain by way of the fatal love of the beautiful cigarette factory worker Carmen with corporal Don José. In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, not set to music as yet, the Duc de Guermantes affects to be the owner of a painting that might just be (he hopes) a Velázquez. He had bought it from his cousin Gilbert. “It was sold to me as a Philippe de Champaigne,” the duke tells the narrator Marcel, “but I believe myself that it’s by someone even greater.… I believe it to be a Velázquez, and of the very best period.” The duke then requests Charles Swann, who is also on hand, to come up with an attribution. Swann, lover of Vermeer above all painters, lightly suggests the painting is a bad joke, and this provokes an outburst of rage from the duke.
As for van Gogh, toward the tragic end of the Dutch painter’s life, Velázquez was often in his thoughts. In mid-August 1888 he wrote from Arles to his brother Theo, thanking him for some canvas and paints, and telling him, touchingly:
This restaurant where I am is very queer; it is completely grey; the floor is of grey bitumen like a street pavement, grey paper on the walls, grey blinds always drawn, a big green curtain in front of the door which is always open, to stop the dust coming in. Just as it is it is a Velázquez grey—like in the Spinning Women—and the very narrow, very fierce ray of sunlight through a blind, like the one that crosses Velázquez’s picture, even that is not wanting, Little tables, of course, with white cloths. And behind this room, in Velázquez grey you see the old kitchen, as clean as a Dutch kitchen, with floor of bright red bricks.… There are two women who wait, both in grey.… I don’t know if I describe it clearly enough to you, but it’s here, and it’s pure Velázquez.
People who otherwise got along not at all with one another could at least be found agreeing about Velázquez as a painter at the forefront of Spanish art, or of art anywhere. John Ruskin, the voluminous critic and social theorist, included Velázquez among the great artists who had a “self-commanding, magnificent animality”—though what Ruskin’s experience was of animality, the Lord knows. Ruskin also said that “considered as pieces of art only, the works of Velázquez are the only consummate pieces in the world.” However, James McNeill Whistler, whose famous libel action against Ruskin won him not the £1,000 damages he wanted but a mere farthing, fulminated against Ruskin and other art critics in December 1878 for “crass idiocy and impertinence.” Whistler’s ire had been detonated by a London Times art writer who had found Velázquez “slovenly in execution, poor in colour—being little but a combination of neutral greys and ugly in its forms!” Whistler’s paintings paid a purer respect to Velázquez—the portraits, for example, of Thomas Carlyle, of Whistler’s mother, of Miss Cicely Alexander, and of himself in the late picture called Brown and Gold, which showed the painter appearing as a tall dark form out of spectral mist. Whistler owned a number of prints of paintings by Velázquez. He also possessed one particular prize, an early photograph of a detail from Las Meninas. An 1857 visit to the spectacular Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester had an immense influence on Whistler; back in London he pored over photographs of Velázquez works that he kept in his studio.
Many artists have used Velázquez as a foil—among them American artists as different as John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt. Sargent went to Spain in 1880 and took on board the influence of Velázquez, particularly as it was visible in Courbet and Manet: Sargent’s scandalously successful Madame Gautreau of 1884 is evidence of this. Mary Cassatt like Sargent studied in France and seems to have been bowled over by the way the French had taken up Spanish art. (As well as American painters, American collectors such as J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick began to get possessive about Velázquez.) Wyndham Lewis, the modern British artist and writer, painted a Surrender of Barcelona (1936–37), which combined cubist/vorticist forms and mechanistic figures, men in seventeenth-century visored helmets and armor, and both foot and horse soldiers bearing upright pikes in a nod to Breda. (The fluid post-Baroque forms of the Barcelona architect Gaudí appear to be more related to El Greco than Velázquez.) As for Pablo Picasso, the twentieth-century arch conjurer, though born in Málaga he made his cubist mark as a Parisian, French, and European showman—at a time when an increasingly strident mass media promised celebrity—rather than as a specifically Spanish artist. His skills in mimicry were indeed spurred by Las Meninas into a characteristic bout of overproduction. The result was more than fifty “variations” after that picture, mostly much whiter and lighter than the original. (They took up a mere two months of Picasso’s time in Cannes in the summer of 1957.) Picasso’s more genuine genuflection to his Spanish predecessor was to be found in his Woman Ironing, painted in Paris in 1904, though the angular, emaciated blue-gray female figure in that picture is more of a Sarajevo or Belsen victim than a Seville kitchen girl—and again, in style if not in subject, maybe more El Greco than Velázquez.
A less prolific and less journalistic modern involvement with Velázquez than Picasso’s Las Meninas series was that of Francis Bacon, whose obsession focused rather on the portrait of Innocent X. When in Rome, Bacon refused to go see the version of the painting itself, which hangs at the Galleria Doria-Pamphilj, but he bought reproductions of it for use in making studies of it. His 1953 Study conveys some of the horror and violence the Anglo-Irish painter found in Velázquez’s picture, with the papal throne turned into what looks like an electric chair, the canvas a grid charged with a lethal current, and the pope’s mouth jolted open in a rictus of death. In a confessional conversation with the critic David Sylvester, Bacon unburdened himself of thoughts prompted by the Innocent X, “one of the greatest portraits that have ever been.” Bacon said that he admired Velázquez’s desire to walk along the edge of a precipice and his ability to keep “so near to what we call illustration and at the same time so deeply unlock the greatest and deepest things that man ever can feel.” Much of this may be more Bacon than Velázquez. Bacon’s pope lets out a scream that seems to have a sadomasochistic origin. Velázquez’s pope appears more on the defensive; if he is ready to strike a blow, it is only because he thinks it the best way of protecting himself.
Picasso and Bacon both bring us to the subject of value, as judged—often weirdly—in monetary terms. The art market is a strange beast. A herd mentality often prevails. At the moment Picasso rides high, Bacon high, van Gogh very high, Jackson Pollock immensely high. At this writing a Pollock painted in 1948 holds the present record sale price of $140 million, obtained in 2006. Picasso appears frequently in the highest-prices-at-auction lists because he was so prolific an artist and is currently so fashionable. But a painter like Velázquez is nearly invisible in such lists. Few Velázquezes are sold. The museums that own them can’t or have no need to sell them and the smart owners don’t want to part with them: They are too valuable to sell, too wonderful, they are priceless. They aren’t gambling chips or stock certificates. The understated yet inestimable value of Velázquez is nicely suggested in J. I. M. Stewart’s delirious 1949 thriller The Journeying Boy, written under the pseudonym Michael Innes, where the eminent and well-to-do nuclear scientist father of the much-threatened-with-kidnap youth Humphrey has two portraits by the master discreetly hanging—amid Spanish furnishings suitable for a modern grandee—in the library of hi
s London mansion. Of the most recent sales of Velázquez paintings, among the few known are the Juan de Pareja sold in 1970 for £2,310,000 ($5,544,000), and the Santa Rufina, a painting of the early 1630s described as “a work of particular intimacy and simplicity,” showing the woman who was martyred and became with her sister Justa one of Seville’s patron saints. The Santa Rufina—probably modeled by Juana Pacheco, Velázquez’s wife—was not seen in public between the 1640s, when in the Madrid collection of Olivares’s nephew Don Luis de Haro, and 1868, when it reappeared on the walls of the Earl of Dudley in England; it was sold in New York in 1999 for just over eight million dollars and in July 2007 went at Sotheby’s in London to a Seville foundation for £8.4 million, over seventeen million dollars. This was not only a world auction record price for Velázquez but the highest price ever achieved for a Spanish Old Master painting.
Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Innocent X, 1953, Des Moines Art Center.
There are elements of guesswork, not so say blarney, in these figures. Both Picasso and Bacon have a certain notoriety value. Both acquire matter for their pictures cannibalistically from the works of earlier artists—Velázquez included. The Juan de Pareja, were it possible to sell it, might fetch a hundred million dollars today. And I believe Bacon would have willingly acknowledged Velázquez’s top position. Unlike some of the contemporary auction-list champions, Velázquez combined in one masterwork after another the ability to feel, the ability to think, and the ability to apply paint. This is not to say that one doesn’t admire Bacon’s attempt to reach the heart of the matter. He was trying to pin down what Velázquez—“an amazingly mysterious painter”—was getting at. Bacon went on to say, “I think that Velázquez believed he was recording the [Spanish] court at that time; but a really good artist today would be forced to make a game of the same situation; photography has altered completely this whole thing of figurative painting.” Furthermore—Bacon said with feeling—a sense of despair was now part of the artistic process: “Man now realises that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without a reason.” The Carthaginian early Christian thinker Tertullian wrote: I believe because it is absurd. In Velázquez’s time, Bacon continued, an artist like Velázquez was still “slightly conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man now … has completely cancelled out for him.” Just how much Velázquez was conditioned by religion, by whatever Jewish blood he retained, or by the surrounding “sea of faith” that buoyed up so many and caused storms that scattered others, we don’t know. We do know of his phlegm and his detachment. We detect a man, who, despite being a civil servant, cocooned in his courtier’s garb, went on asking piercing questions and creating in his art a radiance of duality and doubt. For Velázquez, the haze of mystery was almost a fourth dimension (the dimension of dreams), and it took the place of any simple answer.
Velázquez and the Surrender of Breda Page 26
