of Zuloaga’s portraiture.  He is unconventional in his poses; he will jam a figure against the right side of the frame (as in the portrait of Marthe Morineau) or stand a young lady beside an ornamental iron gate in an open park (not a remarkable portrait, but one that pleases the ladies because of the textures).  The head of the old actor capitally suggests the Spanish mummer.  And the painter’s cousin, Esperanza!  What cousins he boasts!  We recall The Three Cousins, with its laughing trio and the rich colour scheme.  Our recollection, too, of The Piquant Retort, and its brown and scarlet harmonies; of the Promenade After the Bull-fight, which has the classical balance and spaced charm of Velasquez; and that startling Street of Love overbalances any picture except one in this exhibition, and that is The Bull-fighter’s Family.  The measuring eye of Zuloaga, his tremendous vitality, his sharp, superb transference to canvas of the life he has elected to represent and interpret are at first sight dazzling.  The performance is so supreme—­remember, not in a niggling, technical sense—­a half-dozen men beat him at mere pyrotechnics and lace fioritura—­that his limitations, very marked in his case, are overlooked.  You have drunk a hearty Spanish wine; oil to the throat, confusion to the senses.  You do not at first miss the soul; it is not included in the categories of Senor Zuloaga.  Zuloaga, like his contemporary farther north, Anders Zorn, is a man as well as a painter; the conjunction is not too frequent.  The grand manner is surely his.  He has the modulatory sense, and Christian Brinton notes his sonorous acid effects.  He paints beggars, dwarfs, work-girls, noblemen, bandits, dogs, horses, lovely women, gitanas, indolent Carmens; but real, not the pasteboard and foot-lights variety of Merimee and Bizet.  Zuloaga’s Spain is not a second-hand Italy, like that of so many Spanish painters.  It is not all bric-a-brac and moonlight and chivalric tinpot helmets.  It is the real Spain of to-day, the Spain that has at last awakened to the light of the twentieth century after sleeping so long, after sleeping, notwithstanding the desperate nudging it was given a century ago by the realist Goya.  Now, Zuloaga is not only stepping on his country’s toes, but he is recording the impressions he makes.  He, too, is a realist, a realist with such magic in his brush that it would make us forgive him if he painted the odour of garlic.

Have you seen his Spanish Dancers?  Not the dramatic Carmencita of Sargent, but the creature as she is, with her simian gestures, her insolence, her vulgarity, her teeth—­and the shrill scarlet of the bare gum above the gleaming white, His street scenes are a transcript of the actual facts, and inextricably woven with the facts is a sense of the strange beauty of them all.  His wine harvesters, venders of sacred images, or that fascinating canvas My Three Cousins—­before these, also before the Promenade After the Bull-fight, you realise that by some miracle