It was only by degrees that he attained this quality in his work.  He had had the ordinary teaching of a painter in Spain, but the level of art there at the time was not so high as in Holland or Italy.  Like Rembrandt he was to a great extent his own master.  In his early years he painted pictures of middle-class life, in which each figure is truthfully depicted, as were the early heads in Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy.’  Like Rembrandt in his youth, he looked at each head separately and painted it as faithfully as he could.  The higher art of composing into the unity of a group all its parts, and keeping their perfections within such limits as best co-operate in the transcendent perfection of the whole—­this was the labour and the crown of both their lives.  Velasquez’s best and greatest groups are such a realized vision of life that they have remained the despair of artists to this day.

Velasquez came to Court in the year in which Charles I., as Prince of Wales, went to Madrid to woo the sister of Philip IV.  He painted her portrait twice, and made an unfinished sketch of Charles, which has unfortunately been lost.  Five years afterwards Rubens was a visitor at the Spanish Court on a diplomatic errand.  The painters took a fancy to one another, and corresponded for the remainder of their lives.  They must have talked long about their art, and the elder painter, Rubens, is thought to have promoted in Velasquez a desire to see the great treasures of Italy.  At all events we find that in the next year he has obtained permission and money from Philip to undertake the journey, which kept him away from Spain for two years.

There is an amusing page, in doggerel verse, which I remember to have read some years ago.  I trust the translator will pardon the liberty I am taking in quoting it.  It reports a perhaps imaginary conversation between Velasquez and an Italian painter in Rome.  ‘The Master’ in this rhyme is Velasquez.

  The Master stiffly bowed his figure tall
  And said, ’For Raphael, to speak the truth,
  —­I always was plain-spoken from my youth,—­
  I cannot say I like his works at all.’

  ‘Well,’ said the other, ’if you can run down
  So great a man, I really cannot see
  What you can find to like in Italy;
  To him we all agree to give the crown.’

  Velasquez answered thus:  ’I saw in Venice
  The true test of the good and beautiful;
  First, in my judgment, ever stands that school,
  And Titian first of all Italian men is.’

Velasquez in Rome was already a ripening artist, whose vision of the world was quite uncoloured and unshaped by the medieval tradition.  Raphael’s pictures with their superhumanly lovely saints, their unworldly feeling, and their supernaturally clear light, doubtless imparted pleasure, but not a sympathetic inspiration.  Tintoret’s immense creative power and the colours of Titian’s painting which inspired Tintoret’s ambition, as we remember—­these were the