There is one rather remarkable fact to be observed in this picture and many Venetian works, and this is that the #most accented edges are reserved for unessential parts#, like the piece of white drapery on the lower arm of the girl with the cymbals, and the little white flower on the boy’s head in front.  The edges on the flesh are everywhere fused and soft, the draperies being much sharper.  You may notice the same thing in many pictures of the later Venetian schools.  The greatest accents on the edges are rarely in the head, except it may be occasionally in the eyes.  But they love to get some strongly-accented feature, such as a crisply-painted shirt coming against the soft modelling of the neck, to balance the fused edges in the flesh.  In the head of Philip IV in our National Gallery the only place where Velazquez has allowed himself anything like a sharp edge is in the high lights on the chain hanging round the neck.  The softer edges of the principal features in these compositions lend a largeness and mystery to these parts, and to restore the balance, sharpnesses are introduced in non-essential accessories.

In the figure with the white tunic from Velazquez’s “Surrender of Breda,” here reproduced, note the wonderful variety on the edges of the white masses of the coat and the horse’s nose, and also that the sharpest accents are reserved for such non-essentials as the bows on the tunic and the loose hair on the horse’s forehead.  Velazquez’s edges are wonderful, and cannot be too carefully studied.  He worked largely in flat tones or planes; but this richness and variety of his edges keeps his work from looking flat and dull, like that of some of his followers.  I am sorry to say this variety does not come out so well in the reproduction on page 194 [Transcribers Note:  Plate XLIV] as I could have wished, the half-tone process having a tendency to sharpen edges rather monotonously.

This quality is everywhere to be found in nature.  If you regard any scene pictorially, looking at it as a whole and not letting your eye focus on individual objects wandering from one to another while being but dimly conscious of the whole, but regarding it as a beautiful ensemble; you will find that the boundaries of the masses are not hard continuous edges but play continually along their course, here melting imperceptibly into the surrounding mass, and there accentuated more sharply.  Even a long continuous line, like the horizon at sea, has some amount of this play, which you should always be on the look out for.  But when the parts only of nature are regarded and each is separately focussed, hard edges will be found to exist almost everywhere, unless there is a positive mist enveloping the objects.  And this is the usual way of looking at things.  But a picture that is a catalogue of many little parts separately focussed will not hang together as one visual impression.

[Illustration:  Plate XLIV.

PART OF THE SURRENDER OF BREDA.  BY VELAZQUEZ