One cannot speak too much of the large-minded and cultivated spirit of Archer Milton Huntington, who is the projector and patron of the exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum.  Sorolla y Bastida, through the invitation of Mr. Huntington, made this exhibition.

IGNACIO ZULOAGA

We are no longer with Sorolla and his vibrating sunshine on Valencian sands, or under the hard blue dome of San Sebastian; the two-score canvases on view in 1909 at the Hispanic Museum were painted by a man of profounder intellect, of equally sensual but more restrained temperament than Sorolla; above all, by an artist with different ideals—­a realist, not an impressionist, Ignacio Zuloaga.  It would not be the entire truth to say that his masterpieces were seen; several notable pictures, unhappily, were not; but the exhibition was finely representative.  Zuloaga showed us the height and depth of his powers in at least one picture, and the longer you know him the more secrets he yields up.

In Paris they say of Sorolla that he paints too fast and too much; of Zuloaga that he is too lazy to paint.  Half truths, these.  The younger man is more deliberate in his methods.  He composes more elaborately, executes at a slower gait.  He resents the imputation of realism.  The fire and fury of Sorolla are not his, but he selects, weighs, analyses, reconstructs—­in a word, he composes and does not improvise.  He is, nevertheless, a realist—­a verist, as he prefers to be called.  He is not cosmopolitan, and Sorolla is:  the types of boys and girls racing along the beaches of watering places which Sorolla paints are cosmopolitan.  Passionate vivacity and the blinding sunshine are not qualities that appeal to Zuloaga.  He portrays darkest—­let us rather say greenest, brownest Spain.  The Basque in him is the strongest strain.  He is artistically a lineal descendant of El Greco, Velasquez, Goya; and the map of his memory has been traversed by Manet.  He is more racial, more truly Spanish, than any painter since Goya.  He possesses the genius of place.

Havelock Ellis’s book, The Soul of Spain, is an excellent corrective for the operatic Spain, and George Borrow is equally sound despite his bigotry, while Gautier is invaluable.  Arsene Alexandre in writing of Zuloaga acutely remarks of the Spanish conspiracy in allowing the chance tourist only to scratch the soil “of this country too well known but not enough explored.”  Therefore when face to face with the pictures of Zuloaga, with romantic notions of a Spain where castles grow in the clouds and moonshine on every bush, prepare to be shocked, to be disappointed.  He will show you the real Spain—­the sun-soaked soil, the lean, sharp outlines of hills, the arid meadows, and the swift, dark-green rivers.  He has painted cavaliers and dames of fashion, but his heart is in the common people.  He knows the bourgeois and he knows the gipsy.  He has set forth the pride of the vagabond and the garish fascinations of the gitana.  Since Goya, you say, and then wonder whether it might not be wiser to add:  Goya never had so complicated a psychology.  A better craftsman than Goya, a more varied colourist, a more patient student of Velasquez, of life, though without Goya’s invention, caprice, satanism, and fougue.