DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.63331#0101
CHAPTER VIII
LANDSCAPES—THE QUESTION OF MAZO AND HIS OTHER PUPILS
So far, I have said nothing of Velazquez as a landscape painter, partly
because his productions in that class are of comparatively slight import-
ance, partly because the question is complicated by another which will
have now to be treated in some detail. The Madrid Gallery has nine
landscapes ascribed to the master. By far the most interesting, to my
mind, are the two painted apparently direct from nature in the gardens
of the Villa Medici at Rome. They remind one more of Constable
than of any one else, so that here, too, he may be said to have anticipated
modern tastes. The real play of sunlight among trees is the point he
has insisted on ; his colour is fresh and silvery, like a Constable ; his touch
light and feathery, like a Corot. The two pictures of the gardens at
Aranjuez have darkened so much and are hung so high that I have some
diffidence in speaking of them, but I confess they do not strike me as the
work of Velazquez at all. They breathe a spirit foreign to anything we
find in the rest of his pictures ; the figures are certainly not his, while the
handling, so far as we can see it, is quite distinct from that of the Villa
Medici pictures, and of the backgrounds to his portraits. Velazquez is
supposed to have painted these pictures when he was at the Spanish
Windsor with the king in 1642 ; some years before, he had painted the
Don Balthazar Carlos on Horseback, why should he have deserted the
brilliant lightness of the landscape behind the little prince for the heavy-
handed gloom of these Aranjuez pictures ?
But perhaps the most famous of his landscapes is that in the Boar
Hunt of the National Gallery. This picture has undergone so many
vicissitudes that some care has to be used in expressing opinions upon it.
LANDSCAPES—THE QUESTION OF MAZO AND HIS OTHER PUPILS
So far, I have said nothing of Velazquez as a landscape painter, partly
because his productions in that class are of comparatively slight import-
ance, partly because the question is complicated by another which will
have now to be treated in some detail. The Madrid Gallery has nine
landscapes ascribed to the master. By far the most interesting, to my
mind, are the two painted apparently direct from nature in the gardens
of the Villa Medici at Rome. They remind one more of Constable
than of any one else, so that here, too, he may be said to have anticipated
modern tastes. The real play of sunlight among trees is the point he
has insisted on ; his colour is fresh and silvery, like a Constable ; his touch
light and feathery, like a Corot. The two pictures of the gardens at
Aranjuez have darkened so much and are hung so high that I have some
diffidence in speaking of them, but I confess they do not strike me as the
work of Velazquez at all. They breathe a spirit foreign to anything we
find in the rest of his pictures ; the figures are certainly not his, while the
handling, so far as we can see it, is quite distinct from that of the Villa
Medici pictures, and of the backgrounds to his portraits. Velazquez is
supposed to have painted these pictures when he was at the Spanish
Windsor with the king in 1642 ; some years before, he had painted the
Don Balthazar Carlos on Horseback, why should he have deserted the
brilliant lightness of the landscape behind the little prince for the heavy-
handed gloom of these Aranjuez pictures ?
But perhaps the most famous of his landscapes is that in the Boar
Hunt of the National Gallery. This picture has undergone so many
vicissitudes that some care has to be used in expressing opinions upon it.