When, as in the time of Titian, the art of the West had discovered light and shade, linear perspective, aerial perspective, &c., and had begun by fusing the edges of the masses to suspect the necessity of painting to a widely diffused focus, they had got very near considering appearances as a visual whole.  But it was not until Velazquez that a picture was painted that was founded entirely on visual appearances, in which a basis of objective outlines was discarded and replaced by a structure of tone masses.

When he took his own painting room with the little Infanta and her maids as a subject, Velazquez seems to have considered it entirely as one flat visual impression.  The focal attention is centred on the Infanta, with the figures on either side more or less out of focus, those on the extreme right being quite blurred.  The reproduction here given unfortunately does not show these subtleties, and flattens the general appearance very much.  The focus is nowhere sharp, as this would disturb the contemplation of the large visual impression.  And there, I think, for the first time, the whole gamut of natural vision, tone, colour, form, light and shade, atmosphere, focus, &c., considered as one impression, were put on canvas.

All sense of design is lost.  The picture has no surface; it is all atmosphere between the four edges of the frame, and the objects are within.  Placed as it is in the Prado, with the light coming from the right as in the picture, there is no break between the real people before it and the figures within, except the slight yellow veil due to age.

But wonderful as this picture is, as a “tour de force,” like his Venus of the same period in the National Gallery, it is a painter’s picture, and makes but a cold impression on those not interested in the technique of painting.  With the cutting away of the primitive support of fine outline design and the absence of those accents conveying a fine form stimulus to the mind, art has lost much of its emotional significance.

[Illustration:  Plate XI.

LOS MENENAS.  BY VELAZQUEZ (PRADO)

Probably the first picture ever painted entirely from the visual or impressionist standpoint.

Photo Anderson]

[Sidenote:  The Impressionist Point of View.]

But art has gained a new point of view.  With this subjective way of considering appearances—­this “impressionist vision,” as it has been called—­many things that were too ugly, either from shape or association, to yield material for the painter, were yet found, when viewed as part of a scheme of colour sensations on the retina which the artist considers emotionally and rhythmically, to lend themselves to new and beautiful harmonies and “ensembles,” undreamt of by the earlier formulae.  And further, many effects of light that were too hopelessly complicated for painting, considered on the old light and shade