scamps, zealots, pilgrims, beggars, drunkards, and working girls.  What verve, what grip, what bowels of humanity has this Spaniard!  A man, not a professor of academic methods.  He has no school, and he is a school in himself.  That the more serene, poetic aspects and readings of life have escaped him is merely to say that he is not constituted a contemplative philosopher.  The sinister skein to be seen in some of his canvases does not argue the existence of a spiritual bias but is the recognition of evil in life.  It is not very pleasant, nor is it reassuring, but it is part of the artist, rooted deep in his Spanish soul along with the harsh irony and a cruel spirit of mockery.  He refuses to follow the ideals of other men, and he paints a spade a spade; at least the orchestration, if brutal, is not lascivious.  A cold, impartial eye observes and registers the corruption of cities small and great and the infinitely worse immoralities of the open country.  Sometimes Zuloaga’s comments are witty, sometimes pessimistic.  If he has studied Goya and Manet, he also knows Felicien Rops.

The only picture in the Zuloaga exhibition that grazes the border-land of the unconventional is Le Vieux Marcheur.  It is as moral as Hogarth and as bitter as Rops.  It recalls the Montmartre days of the artist when he was acquainted with Paul Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec.  Two women are crossing a bridge.  Their actuality is impressed upon the retina in a marvellous ly definite way.  They live, they move.  One is gowned in dotted green, the other in black.  There is a little landscape with water beyond the iron railing.  A venerable minotaur is in pursuit.  He wears evening clothes, an overcoat is thrown across his left arm, under his right he carries waggishly a cane.  His white tie and hat of sober silk are in respectable contrast with his air of fatuousness—­the Marquis of Steyne en route; the doddering hero of Mansfield in A Parisian Romance, or Baron Hulot.  The alert expression of the girls, who appear to be loitering, tells us more at a glance than a chapter of Flaubert, Zola, or De Maupassant.  Is it necessary to add that the handling takes your breath away because of its consummate ease and its realisation of the effects sought?  Note the white of the old party’s spats, echoed by the bit of stocking showing a low shoe worn by one of the girls; note the values of the blacks in the hat, coat, trousers, shoe tips of the man.  The very unpleasantness of the theme is forgotten in the supreme art of its presentation.

M. Alexandre, the French critic, may argue valiantly that Zuloaga must not be compared with Goya, that their methods and themes are dissimilar.  True, but those witches (Les Sorcieres de San Millan) are in the key of Goya, not manner, but subject-matter—­a hideous crew.  At once you think of the Caprichos of Goya.  The hag with the distaff, whose head is painted with a fidelity worthy of Holbein; the monkey profile of the witch crouching near the lantern, that