dull colours, and a magnificent rococo screen separates the sacristy from the middle aisle.  Venetian lustres are suspended from the ceiling, pictures of martyrs, Venetian glasses in carved oval frames hang on the wall, richly ornamented wooden benches and a library of missals and gospels in sparkling silver clasps, and shining marble tables and glistening braziers form part of the scene in which the marriage contract is being signed.  The costumes are those of the time of Goya.  An old beau is marrying a young and beautiful girl.  With affected grace and a skipping minuet step, holding a modish three-cornered hat under his arm, he approaches the table to put his signature in the place which the escribano points out with an obsequious bow.  He is arrayed in delicate lilac, while the bride is wearing a white silk dress trimmed with flowered lace and has a wreath of orange blossoms in her luxuriant black hair.  As a girl friend is talking to her she examines with abstracted attention the pretty little pictures upon her fan, the finest she ever possessed.  A very piquant little head she has, with her long lashes and black eyes.  Then, in the background, follow the witnesses, and first of all a young lady in a swelling silk dress of the brightest rose colour.  Beside her is one of the bridegroom’s friends in a cabbage-green coat with long flaps and a shining belt, from which a gleaming sabre hangs.  The whole picture is a marvellous assemblage of colours in which tones of Venetian glow and strength, the tender pearly gray beloved of the Japanese, and a melting neutral brown each sets off the other and gives a shimmering effect to the entire mass.”

Fortuny was a gay master of character and comedy as well as of bric-a-brac.  Still life he painted as no one before or after him; if Chardin is the Velasquez of vegetables, Fortuny is the Rossini of the rococo; such lace-like filigrees, fiorturi, marbles that are of stone, men and women that are alive, not of marble (like Alma-Tadema’s).  The artificiality of his work is principally in the choice of a subject, not in the performance.  How luminous and silky are his blacks may be noted at the Metropolitan Museum in his portrait of a Spanish lady.  There is nothing of the petit-maitre in the sensitive and adroit handling of values.  The rather triste expression, the veiled look of the eyes, the morbidezza of the flesh tones, and the general sense of amplitude and grace give us a Fortuny who knew how to paint broadly.  The more obvious and dashing side of him is present in the Arabian Fantaisie of the Vanderbilt Gallery.  It must be remembered that he spent some time copying, at Madrid, Velasquez and Goya, and as Camille Mauclair enthusiastically declares, these copies are literal “identifications.”  They are highly prized by the Marquise Carcano (who owned the Vicaria), Madrazo, and the Baron Davillieu—­the last named the chief critical authority on Fortuny.