Indeed, there is a marked similarity between the style of Fortuny and that of Meissonier.  When some busybody informed Meissonier that Fortuny was imitating him, Meissonier replied, “To have such a genius as Mariano Fortuny imitate me would be the greatest happiness of my whole career.”

Fortuny’s life is mirrored in his name:  his whole career was one triumphant march to fortune, fame, love and honor.

He avoided society, as he was jealous of the fleeting hours, and his close friends were few; but those who knew him loved him to a point just this side of idolatry.

Fortuny died at Rome on November Twenty-second, Eighteen Hundred Seventy-two, of brain rupture—­an instant and painless death.  In his short life of thirty-six years he accomplished remarkable results, but all this splendid work he regarded as merely in the line of preparation for a greater work yet to come.

For some weeks before he died he had been troubled with a slight fever, contracted, he thought, from painting in a damp church; but the day of his death he took up his brush again and, as he worked, gaily talked with his wife of their plans for the future.

It is very pleasant to recall, however, that before death claimed him, Fortuny had completed the great picture of “The Battle of Wad Ras.”  The canvas is now hanging on the wall of the Parliament House at Barcelona, and the picture is justly the pride of the city that showed itself such a wise and loving mother to the motherless boy, Mariano Fortuny.

* * * * *

Italy and Spain are sisters, and not merely first cousins, as Mr. Whistler once remarked.  Their history to a great degree is contemporaneous.  They have seen dynasties arise, grow old, and die; and schools of art, once the pride of the people, sink into blank forgetfulness:  for schools, like dynasties and men, live their day and go tottering to their rest.

Italy, as the elder sister, has set the fashion for the younger.  The manners, habits and customs of the people have been the same.

To a great extent all art is controlled by fad and fashion; and all the fashions in the polite arts easily drifted from Italy into Spain.  The works of Titian carried to Madrid produced a swarm of imitators, some of whom, like Velasquez, Zurbaran, Ribera and Murillo, having spun their cocoons, passed through the chrysalis stage, developed wings, and soared to high heaven.  But the generations of imitators who followed these have usually done little better than gape.

And although Spain has been a kind mother to art for four hundred years, yet the modern school of Spanish art shows no “apostolic succession” from the past.  It is a thing separate and alone:  gorgeous, dazzling, strong, and rarely beautiful.  Totally unlike the art of the old masters, it takes its scenes from Nature and actual living life—­depending not on myth, legend or fable.  It discards pure imagination, and by holding a mirror up to Nature has done the world the untold blessing of introducing it to itself.