The painter as king
Andrew Lambirth
Velázquez
National Gallery, until 21 January 2007 (sponsored by Abbey)
The first thing to be said is how good this exhibition looks upstairs in the main body of the National Gallery, hung in large, well-proportioned rooms, in natural light, rather than in the dungeons of the Sainsbury wing, where most temporary shows have been consigned in recent years. At last common sense has prevailed at the NG, and fabulous loan exhibitions may be seen in a favourable context. To have gathered together these 40 works by Velázquez — almost half his surviving output — is a remarkable achievement and not likely to be repeated during our lifetime. It is only right and proper that they are shown in the best setting. Such a rare event is to be savoured, which is why I find the comments of certain critics churlish when they complain that since Velázquez’s great masterpiece ‘Las Meninas’ is not among the exhibits, the display is irredeemably flawed. The Prado will not lend it, and that’s an end to the matter. Think positively: now you have a good excuse for a trip to Madrid ....
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660) is widely accepted as the great est Spanish painter, and as one of the greatest artists of all time. Born in Seville, he was trained to paint religious subjects, but it was clear from early on that he was more interested in the singularity of the individual, and depicting people in a secular setting. His memorable ‘bodegones’, or genre pictures uniting still-life and figures, either in the kitchen or the tavern, were among the first of their kind in Spain, and remain highly celebrated. His exceptional skills at portraiture made him a perfect candidate for preferment at court, and in 1622 he made his first visit to Madrid, being appointed the King’s Painter the following year. The court of Philip IV was a splendid façade, masking a disintegrating empire, riven by power struggles and an uncertain succession. Velázquez’s job was to portray the chief protagonists of this drama. His supreme achievement lay in making of his state portraits great human documents that capture the joys and travails of the human spirit as surely as anything more obviously and classically timeless.
This remarkable exhibition begins with a painting perhaps from 1616–17 called ‘Three Musicians’, and quite possibly Velázquez’s earliest known work. It is a ‘bodegon’, with three figures and a monkey disposed around a table-top still-life, though the forced expressions and slightly unconvincing picture-space give it a strained look. The yellowish flesh tints seem to have a peeled quality, pale like the interior of a fruit. Much more assured is the nearby painting ‘An Old Woman Cooking Eggs’ and the magnificent ‘Water-Seller of Seville’. (Velázquez was 19 when he started painting it.) These unusual subjects from everyday life were demonstrations of virtuosity, splendid examples of the painter’s austere early style, predicated above all on naturalism. Much has been made of the influence of Caravaggio on Velázquez, but this exhibition’s curator, Dawson Carr, who also curated the NG’s recent Caravaggio show, reminds us that nature, not other art, was his foundation stone. And of course the real originality of Velázquez lies in the fact that he did not simply scrutinise appearances, but looked deeper, and was able to transcend realism to get at the inner truth.
This first room, with its immensely powerful opening of ‘bodegones’, including two kitchen scenes with a religious subject pictured in the background, moves into straightforward religious imagery in its second half. The linking painting is the kneeling portrait of the priest Don Cristóbal Suárez de Ribera, a posthumous likeness intended for his tomb, with a prominent grouping of trees (Velázquez’s first landscape) to the rear on the right. The centrepiece of the religious works is the 1619 ‘Adoration of the Magi’, a painting of sober veneration, lit up by the probing stare of the swaddled but lively Christ Child. In contrast, Room 2 is dominated by a pagan subject, ‘Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan’. This brilliantly orchestrated figure group is dramatically lit as the sun god drops in to cause trouble by telling the blacksmith that his wife (Venus) is having an affair with Mars. Unified by a warm grey ground for greater luminosity, the painting was done in Rome on Velázquez’s first visit to Italy (1629–31), and mingles the influence of classical sculpture with the artist’s habitual naturalism. On the wall opposite is ‘Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob’, not quite so arresting a composition, but notable for its array of calf muscles across the bottom of the canvas as Velázquez tried out different postures.
Against these impressive figure groups are such powerful single portraits as that of Philip IV’s favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, full-length and formidable despite the smallness of his head; and ‘Don Pedro de Barberana y Aparregui’, almost as direct and disturbing. Room 3 features that sempiternal favourite of the NG, ‘Philip IV Hunting Wild Boar’, in which Velázquez typically reverses the expected ratio of attention and focuses on the courtiers relaxing on the fringe of the composition, relegating the actual hunt to the middle-distance. It’s a marvellous painting, a crowd scene with a difference, with its daringly empty centre (conjuring thoughts of Manet and Goya), and the extraordinary way the light, dancing brushstrokes capture the flickering foliage and the dashing cloaks of the trio on horseback at middle front. In this room also are portraits of the dwarf Francisco Lezcano, with its edgy uncertain expression, and the nicely informal ‘Philip IV as a Hunter’. A rather self-satisfied ‘Francesco I, Duke of Este’ is flanked by two anonymous portraits, frank, intelligent and psychologically acute. The full-length ‘Philip IV of Spain in Brown and Silver’ shows Velázquez at his inventive best in the rendition of costume. He suggests rather than states, evoking the rich silver embroidery through an inspired shorthand of squiggles and dashes.
As Dawson Carr writes: ‘His mature style, distinctive for its awesome economy, shows that he developed insight into the optical effects of paint that has never been surpassed.’ This is Velázquez’s particular achievement — spontaneous brushwork at the service of exactitude, carrying light to all parts of the canvas with an expressive freedom previously unknown, which nevertheless satisfied the demands of naturalism. This is amply demonstrated in the last room of the exhibition, containing the gorgeous ‘Rokeby Venus’, with a very camp Mars next to her and ‘Queen Mariana of Austria’ in black and silver facing you as you enter. Look also at the newly cleaned ‘Pope Innocent X’ to appreciate Velázquez’s dazzling paint-handling at its most free. Meanwhile, the royal portraits grow unbearably touching. Here is the palely luminous ‘Infanta Margarita in a Blue Dress’, then there is the little crown prince, Felipe Prospero, on whom all hopes rested. But most moving of all is the aged face of Philip IV in Velázquez’s last portrait — weary unto death and full of sorrow.
It seems that Velázquez was genuinely friendly with the king, a rare outcome of royal patronage in those days, though his court duties became increasingly onerous after his appointment as Chamberlain of the Royal Palace in 1652. In fact, it’s said that his responsibility for arranging the wedding ceremony of the Infanta Maria Theresa to Louis XIV of France in 1660 so wore him out that he contracted the fever that killed him. And it’s certainly true that he painted less in his last decade. But what could a poor painter do? At least royal protection enabled him to produce the masterpieces we see today at the National Gallery, and for that we are eternally grateful.
Previous page
