We admire the enthusiasm of Mr. Ricketts for Velasquez, and his analysis is second to none save R.A.M.  Stevenson’s.  Yet we do protest the painter was not the bundle of negations Mr. Ricketts has made of him in his evident anxiety that some homage may be diverted from Titian.  Titian is incomparable.  Velasquez is unique.  But to describe him as an artist who cautiously studied the work of other men, and then avoided by a series of masterly omissions and evasions their faults as well as their excellences, is a statement that robs Velasquez of his originality.  He is not an eclectic.  He is a man of affirmations, Velasquez.  A student to his death, he worked slowly, revised painfully, above all, made heroic sacrifices.  Each new canvas was a discovery.  The things he left out of his pictures would fill a second Prado Museum.  And the things he painted in are the glories of the world.  Because of his simplicity, absence of fussiness, avoidance of the mock-heroic, of the inflated “grand manner,” critics have pressed too heavily upon this same simplicity.  There is nothing as subtle as his simplicity, for it is a simplicity that conceals subtlety.  No matter the time of day or season of the year you visit Velasquez, you never find him off his guard.  Aristocratic in his ease, he disarms you first.  You may change your love, your politics, your religion, but once a Velasquez worshipper, always one.

Mr. Ricketts, over-anxious at precisely placing him, writes of his “distinction.”  He is the most “distinguished” painter in history.  But we contend that this phrase eludes precise definition.  “Distinguished” in what? we ask.  Style, character, paint quality, vision of the beautiful?  Why not come out plumply with the truth:  Velasquez is the supreme harmonist in art.  No one ever approached him in his handling save Hals, and Hals hardly boasts the artistic inches of Velasquez.  Both possessed a daylight vision of the world.  Reality came to them in the sharpest guise; but the vision of Velasquez came in a more beautiful envelope.  And his psychology is profounder.  He painted the sparkle of the eyes and also the look in them, the challenging glance that asks:  “Are we, too, not humans?” Titian saw colour as a poet, Velasquez as a charmer and a reflective temperament.  Hals doesn’t think at all.  He slashes out a figure for you and then he is done.  The graver, deeper Spaniard is not satisfied until he has kept his pact with nature.  So his vision of her is more rounded, concrete, and truthful than the vision of other painters.  The balance in his work of the most disparate and complex relations of form, space, colour, and rhythm has the unpremeditated quality of life; yet the massive harmonic grandeurs of Las Meninas have been placed by certain critics in the category of glorified genre.