Some prefer Las Hilanderas in the outer gallery.  After the stately equestrian series, the Philip, the Olivares, the Baltasar Carlos; after the bust portraits of Philip in the Prado and in the National Gallery, the hunting series; after the Crucifixion and its sombre background, you return to The Spinners and wonder anew.  Its subtitle might be:  Variations on the Theme of Sunshine.  In it the painter pursues the coloured adventures of a ray of light.  Rhythmically more involved and contrapuntal than The Maids, this canvas, with its brilliant broken lights, its air that circulates, its tender yet potent conducting of the eye from the rounded arm of the seductive girl at the loom to the arched area with its leaning, old-time bass-viol, its human figures melting dream-like into the tapestried background, arouses within the spectator much more complicated etats d’ame than does Las Meninas.  The silvery sorceries of that picture soothe the spirit and pose no riddles; The Spinners is a cathedral crammed with implications.  Is it not the last word of the art of Velasquez—­though it preceded The Maids?  Will the eye ever tire of its glorious gloom, its core of tonal richness, its virile exaltation of everyday existence?  Is it only a trick of the wrist, a deft blending of colours by this artist, who has been called, wrongfully—­the “Shakespeare of the brush”?  Is all this nothing more than “distinguished”?

Mr. Ricketts justly calls Las Lanzas the unique historic picture.  Painted at the very flush of his genius, painted with sympathy for the conquered and the conqueror—­Velasquez accompanied the Marquis of Spinola to Italy—­this Surrender of Breda has received the homage of many generations.  Sir Joshua Reynolds asserted that the greatest picture at Rome was the Velasquez head of Pope Innocent X in the Doria Palace (a variant is in the Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg).  What would he have said in the presence of this captivating evocation of a historic event?  The battle pieces of Michael Angelo, Da Vinci, and Titian are destroyed; Las Lanzas remains a testimony to the powers of imaginative reconstruction and architectonic of Velasquez.  It is the most complete, the most natural picture in the world.  The rhythms of the bristling lances are syncopated by a simple device; they are transposed to another plane of perspective, there in company with a lowered battle standard.  The acute rhythms of these spears has given to the picture its title of The Lances, and never was title more appropriate.  The picture is at once a decorative arabesque, an ensemble of tones, and a slice of history.  Spinola receives from the conquered Justin of Nassau the keys of the beleagured Breda.  Velasquez creates two armies out of eight figures, a horse and fourteen heads—­here is the recipe of Degas for making a multitude carried to the height of the incredible.  His own portrait, that of a grave, handsome man, may be seen to the right of the big horse.