Standing aloof from the ideas and tendencies of his times and not a sweeper of the chords that stir in human nature the heroic or the pathetic, it is none the less uncritical to rank this Spaniard as a brainless technician.  Everything is relative, and the scale on which Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius as a museum panorama.  Let us not be misled by the worship of the elephantine.  It is characteristic of his temperament that the big battle piece he was commissioned by the Barcelona Academy to paint was never finished.  Not every one who goes to Rome does as the Romans do.  Dowered by nature with extraordinary acuity of vision, with a romantic, passionate nature and a will of steel, Fortuny was bound to become a great painter.  His manual technique bordered on the fabulous; he had the painter’s hand, as his fellow-countryman Pablo de Sarasate had the born hand of the violinist.  That he spent the brief years of his life in painting the subjects he did is not a problem to be posed, for, as Henry James has said, it is always dangerous to challenge an artist’s selection of subject.  Why did Goya conceive his Caprichos?  The love of decorative beauty in Fortuny was not bedimmed by criticism.  He had the lust of eye which not the treasures of Ormuz and Ind, or ivory, apes, and peacocks, could satisfy.  If he loved the kaleidoscopic East, he also knew his Spain.  We have seen at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts a tiny picture, the court-yard of a Spanish inn through which passes a blinding shaft of sunlight, which would make envious Senor Sorolla.  Fortuny has personal charm, a quality usually missing nowadays, for painters in their desire to be truthful are tumbling head over heels into the prosaic.  Individuality is vanishing in the wastes of an over-anxious realism.  If Fortuny is a daring virtuoso on one or two strings, his palette is ever enchanting.  Personally he was a handsome man, with a distinguished head, his body broad and muscular and capable of enduring fatigues that would have killed most painters.  Allied to this powerful physique was a seductive sensibility.  This peasant-born painter was an aristocrat of art.  Old Mother Nature is an implacable ironist.

SOROLLA Y BASTIDA

We might say of the Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida that he was one of those who came into the world with a ray of sunshine in their brains—­altering the phrase of Villiers de l’Isle Adam.  Senor Sorolla is also one of the half-dozen (are there so many?) great living painters.  He belongs to the line of Velasquez and Goya, and he seldom recalls either.  Under the auspices of the Hispanic Society of America there was an exhibition of his works in 1909, some two hundred and fifty in all, hung in the museum of the society, West 156th Street, near Broadway.  The liveliest interest was manifested by the public and professional people in this display.  Those