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II ) MARIANO FORTUNY

The story of Fortuny's life is as fascinating as a romance and as warming as sunshine. It was a proud and sweet life, darkened by no meanness. He was one of the few men of this earth who are happy in the persevering employment of intellectual force and in the discreet use of the force of the heart. Happiness is reached through work and prudence. They merit, as the painter merited, the supreme recompense of dying in full happiness.

This child of genius was courageous, laborious, and modest. His ancestors were not great. From morning to night they labored as workmen in the provincial theatres. He suffered the grieves which make a child prematurely old. He became an orphan: he knew poverty, a useful acquaintance; his poor old grandfather could do nothing for him. As the boy pencilled so much and so well, he was sent to the Academy. There he labored incessantly. No one talked less or worked harder. His marvelous nature encompassed everything. To have seen him earnestly watching the clouds which passed over the earth, or gazing at the holes in the shoes of the poor Catalonian workmen, you would have imagined that the boy was absorbing nature herself. Such was the truth. When he wished to reproduce nature, he had only to take it from himself. Like birds, poets and painters make nests from the straws which they find. With them to see is to know. A man's true birthday is the day when, after having examined others, he begins to live by himself. Unfortunately, Fortuny died when this new life opened a life impatient and immense. His genius, as humble as it was powerful, had become restive. Art in his honest hands had prepared itself with ardor to engage in the battle of the century, to dispatch the dead whose ghosts keep us from advancing, and to cause to bloom like roses upon tombs a fragrant and fresh art. He died of a common malady, which easily destroyed a body bent with weight of soul. His death caused profound grief. People felt, even if they did not know, that the poet of truth and the painter of the century was dead.

Although there was much intrinsic value in everything that Fortuny did, it was in executing little things that he became great. Obliged to make a living, he paid his contribution in a way that educated the vulgar taste. He wished to enfranchise himself in order to master others. His was a singularly happy character, in which force came from the equilibrium of forces. He was extreme in everything. Misfortune comes from being extreme in some one thing only. His activity was extraordinary. At Rome he studied the nude at the Academy Chigi, the masters in the galleries, picturesque life in the Roman Campagna; and he sifted numerous water colors and etchings in the same day. His pride, which he preserved unwounded, wounded no one. His humility was so sincere that his goodness was touching. His rare reasoning qualities were fed by the rare qualities of his heart. He tempered the knowledge of its own strength, that genius possesses, by the salutary and singular timidity which distinguishes genius. Like all great souls, after having been poor, he was gentle. He was happy because he knew and had paid the price of his happiness. He knew how to listen, to love, and to speak. Indulgent to noisy activity, he kept himself in repose. His repose was the easel, the album, and the loose sheet of drawing paper. In repose he sat down in Madrid, and with a memory filled with souvenirs of Goya fully as great as himself, more passionate but less active and elegant finished the exquisite water color, Une Aventure de Carnaval. His only real repose was death. Perpetual idleness is a terrible chastisement. On the day before his death, Fortuny was still sketching with a steady hand the mask of the dead Beethoven for his wife's album. His fecundity came from his feverish activity.

Barcelona is an egotistical city. The spirit of the middle ages is imbedded in the hearts of its people, despite the ardor with which they embrace modem ideas. Here, when still a boy, Fortuny worked most industriously. At the Academy he studied historic art under Mila and Gothic art under Lorenzales, a pupil of Overbeck. At home he fervently copied Gavarni. He saw the man where they wished him to look at the saint. And he did well, for saints have passed away, and men remain. He was then extremely poor. Without a monthly pittance of six crowns, given to him by a good priest, he could not have studied at the Academy. For the sake of his art he cared not for the deliberate excesses of Gavarni, if the expression was there. To him the severity of Overbeck was nothing, so long as it was death. Unlike his colleagues, Mila preferred to encourage rather than to kill the individuality of his pupils. His great aim was to guide and not to check talent: to allow it to take flight and measure the strength of its wings without trying to turn an eagle into a dove or a dove into an eagle. He gave rules for composition, but he wished his pupils to conceive. One day a heap of cartoons was left upon Prof. Mila's table. He examined one of them and was astonished. "Of him who has made this cartoon," he cried, "I say as Haydn said of Mozart: He will lead all the others." This public proclamation of talent was so badly received by the directors of the Academy that the Professor was forced to resign.

But Fortuny did lead all the others. He was already the leader, both because he deserved to be and because he did not seek it. Not to try to get a thing is frequently the sure way to get it. His comrades applauded, defended, and obeyed him. They selected him for the prize of Rome. Caricature and sculpture were then dividing and misleading his powers. He did not then possess the knowledge of light and of warm undulating air, nor the method of divesting bright colors of their loud qualities without robbing them of their luminousness. It was after this that he made these wonderful discoveries. But he already had a marvelous perception of lines. Elegance, flexibility, and an extreme variety marked his figures. As Sir Joshua Reynolds said of Raphael, "He had the poetry of design." His gracefulness was correct. With surprising dexterity he threw off the most unpromising subjects. If the subjects were worn out, his methods were new. He owed his final triumph in supreme art to this ceaseless observation, his untiring copying, and to his absolute mastery of the preparatory arts. His force he owed to study, and his dexterity to exercise. Like a good soldier, he never allowed his arms to rust. His brushes were never dry.

While packing his trunks to go to Rome, he was conscripted. He was in agony. In his eyes the sky was no longer the plaything whose marvels he could bring down to his feet. All his bright dreams were about to be turned into miseries so real that traces of grief were ever afterward limned in his sad smile. In all his pleasures, including even the prattle of his children, this smile softened his face. The good Bofarull family paid his ransom. His trunks were packed, and he went to see what nobody should die without seeing Raphael's Transfiguration and Michael Angelo's Last Judgement. He took with him his friend Almet. We may see the young Spanish painter at this time, with his leonine head, his luxuriant curling hair, his bold and defiant nose, his thick lips, his quick, uneasy, and devouring eyes, his high, square forehead, and round, bare neck, encircled with a very low collar and a full cravat. He took to Rome a letter addressed to Overbeck, which he never presented. His was the impatient ardor of a young man who, lost in the ruins left by those who had preceded him, angrily chides himself because he cannot quickly find his way out. He was hardly in Rome before the most antagonistic inspirations annoyed his sleep. His brush, however, was free. He painted St. George Killing the Dragon, St. Paul Preaching to the Athenians, poor devout St. Mariano in a wine-colored coat praying in the desert, a sacrifice to Bacchus, and nymphs dancing around a statue in a mossy grotto. Everywhere, in public and private galleries, he studied the most noble lines of human art. He copied the fine and haughty heads of the women of the poor quarters of the Eternal City. Sleep took the brush from his hands; the sun returned it to them. He saw a woman washing, and she became a picture. A heavy carriage rolled past him; he sketched it. He did something for every visitor for one a sketch of a countryman, for another a noble Roman, and for a third a ruined wall. Once he dined with Agrassot, Valles, and Cucianello, and the macaroni was late. His brush preserved the dinner. He saw two decrepit old women quarrelling. Go to his album and you will find that these angry beldames were the inspiration of his marvelous etching, The Witches.

A decaying monarchy needed regilding with the tinsel of war. Spain waged war on Africa. She fancied that Morocco had insulted her flag. Catalonians, who die like heroes, rushed to the field of battle to renew their ancient glories. A Catalonian alone ought to paint dying Catalonians. Fortuny bade adieu to pines and willows, to the Porta del Popolo, to the rare suppers of Cucianello, and embarked for Morocco. He saw a new land. The Roman sky now seemed sickly, and the day of the north of Spain was colorless. He was in a land deluged by a sea of sunlight. Mounted on an Arab steed, he rode about unconquerable, joyous, full of life, sketching with a bold hand the shot that fell at his feet. He belonged to the staff of the famous Gen. Prim. He dined and slept in Prim's tent. Prim honored himself in honoring this young man. Wandering beyond the encampment, Fortuny and a companion were surprised by the children of the desert, who threatened them with death. "Ah, but we are Englishmen," shouted the painter's comrade. The ruse saved their lives. When Morocco was subdued and the war was over, a fine horse, richly caparisoned, took the road to Rome. He shook his rosy nostrils in the sunlight. An impatient Arab gave him the spur, and, bending his proud head over the foaming neck of the animal, disappeared in a cloud of dust. It was the genius of Fortuny consecrated to light in the burning land of Africa.

Again in Spain, Barcelona engaged Fortuny to paint a great war picture. The city pensioned him. Like all who wish to produce a lasting work, he made it a work of devotion. Abstraction is the parent of production. An idea in the brain should be cherished as a woman cherishes her unborn child. It must be allowed to develop, to flower, and to bear fruit. What did Fortuny care for all that he saw in Rome? He was painting his dear Arabs. He had forgotten the artistic Tivoli, the beautiful trees of the Albano, and the coquettish gardens of the rich villa Borghese. Raphael's Miracle of Bolsena, illustrating the conversion of a sinner at the sight of the Host, which like a barometrical flower exposed to the heat becomes red in the eyes of the unbeliever, had faded from his memory. Domenichino's St. Jerome, finer than that of Correggio, and Guercino's St. Petronile had lost their charm. He was no longer entranced by Fra Angelico's Legend of Nicholas de Varie, the work of a painter so devout that his colors seemed to come from heaven. Fortuny undoubtedly preferred the vapory colors of the passionate Raphael to the knotty contours of the sombre Buonarotti; but blinded with African light, and as independent as his beloved Arabs, in the presence of a brilliant reality he despised the pale ideal of those pagan gods.

On his return from Morocco, Fortuny transferred his African impressions to canvas. The Arabs, whom the Catalonians had subdued, and who wanted to kill him, now posed for him. The horses which had flown from him like dreams, like desires, and like flashes of lightning, now proud and docile, obeyed him. He had caught the idea of his best etchings, The Dead Kabyle and The Arab Watching the Body of his Dead Friend. His greed for the beautiful was satiated in those flexible and charming creatures, the most noble and most elegant that people the earth. The desert is the only country in the world where the men are more interesting than the women. Fortuny discovered their majestic contempt for the world and their sacred love for the plain and the desert. There they were free. The desert, vast and solitary, resembled the beautiful sky, and the tribes roamed the sandy wastes as freely as clouds drift over the heavens. It was at this time that he painted the Persian Carpet Merchant and sketched the Fantasy of Morocco. The exuberance of color and intensity of light he drew from the skies of Africa. With piercing eyes he discovered both the physical and the moral beauties of nature. In the man that is he found the man that was. A suit of armor revealed the time in which it was worn. A glance, a movement, brought out for him an entire character.

From this time onward he worked only at the sun at light. He saw the battlefield that he was to paint when he ran his thumb through his palette. He caught in their flight the miserable unfortunates who flew from village to village. He photographed the patient and intelligent camels and the mosques with walls as white as polished silver and with cupolas as red as blood. To him nothing was hidden. He haw both the slight form and the generous and indifferent soul of the Arab who blends the air of a grandee with that of a beggar.

Fortuny returned to Rome. He was more modest, and consequently more powerful, than ever. The Barcelonians besieged him like ferocious creditors. "What is this painter doing?" they asked. They demanded their picture. They reproached him and wrote him insolent letters, as though the divine hours of genius were subject to the will of human desires, and could be their slaves. For the execution of great works we must await the inspired moment which transforms and creates. Fortuny was offended. He laid aside the details of the great picture wonderful sketches already finished Catalonians with red cape, dead Arabs, and wounded horses that appeared to feel all the horror of battle and the grandeur of defeat. The Barcelonian delegation gazed at the sketches and were enraptured. They became repentant, and implored him to resume his work. He replied by sending back the money that they had advanced him, and the painting was never finished. A sketch of it was saved, however, and is preserved in the museum at Madrid. The picture has all the vigor, all the muscular elasticity and all the grace of an Arab steed. The battle is there before our eyes. The repulsed African cavalry die a noble death. Their white cloaks fleet in the air. A stroke of the pencil has formed a head manly, expressive, correct. A touch of the brush has made a magnificent fold. It is a symphony of movement, revealing the grace of strength, the elegance of horror, and the beauty of death. To see is to believe. A mounted sheik falls like a cane broken by the wind. Prone on the back of his charger, he covers with his bronzed hand the breast from which his proud life is oozing. Everything either comes, goes, runs, falls, rises, or abouts, and all in an atmosphere made heavy and dull by the vapors of the battle. In this canvas everything even the day dies. And justly so. Arabs die when the sun goes down. In the distance the plain is seen. The great red spots are blood. This broad yellow line is the setting sun. Night is rushing from the lofty blue mountain. The dying sunlight falls on the dying Arabs, honoring their death and bringing their figures into bold relief. This glorious picture shows no improper movement, no hurtful color, no false beauty, no repugnant dead body, and no living man who is not full of life. Surrounding nature is involved in the bitter and ferocious spirit of the fight. Beneath the brush of the painter it becomes an element of the battle. The picture is good to see. Although sad, it soothes while it elevates. It is good to find in these old worn-out countries, where everything seems to die and to rot, a work so noble and one that reveals so much power and so much strength in human nature.

After this work Fortuny sold his sketch, An Odalisque Listening to a Guitar, to a Russian for thirty crowns, and was satisfied that he had received a good price. Fortune, flying from those who seek her, finally knocks at the doors of those who wait until they merit her. She nailed her wheel at Fortuny's door. His etchings fetched high prices. Like Rembrandt, Vandyke, and Goya, he was an excellent aquafortist. His etched work is as vigorous as gracious, as fantastic as correct. In water colors he had no rival. Connoisseurs asked with surprise how the Spaniard could give such relief and such power to the pale and sickly shades of these colors. His art was a brilliant truth. He dared to place red and yellow side by side, and they remained good friends. His green was bright and soothing. He did not seek to paint those blind hours when nature, apparently in a moment of sickly passion, embellishes foaming cascades, silvery rivers, and thick woods with the strongest shades. He depicted the tranquil and constant splendor of nature, more difficult to render because it does not put forth special efforts which might by their rarity excuse the extravagance and excesses of the painter. In painting, as in love, the greatest and rarest merit is to be faithful.

Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Corot, and other great landscape painters were too poetic. They blended the images of nature with the images of their souls. Nature beautifully deformed is too personal to be true. Right here was the strength of Fortuny. He knew how to silence and to efface his own personality. He never allowed his reveries to fall on his canvas; he used his personality in delineating the real colors and proportions of nature. Even the air, the first element of nature, almost always forgotten by painters, has its proportions. It is the air which creates distance and softens the hard brilliancy of light. It rounds and finishes figures and gives to the canvas the flexibility of life. This thing unseizable Fortuny seized. You can breathe the pure, luminous, and humid air of his pictures. Its perfection is shown in his Serpent Charmer and his Plage de Portici. He had a method of his own for indicating perspective. Painters express distance by great spaces, but he confined them in narrow limits. Others created the perspective for edifices; he applied it to the human body.

Fortuny's fame sprang from the concealment of his impatience to become famous. His friends called him to Paris. There he saw the steel-like finish of Meissonier, the massive woods of Diaz, and the chivalrous Arabs of Fromentin. He had all of the exquisite and none of the harsh qualities of Meissonier; he knew how to paint the blue skies of Diaz without dragging in the shadows of his oaks; and he could make Fromentin's Arabs still more slight without softening their striking nobility.

His dreams of high art were still hidden in the recesses of his heart. He had learned that to become the master of others, you must begin by becoming their servant. He had to ask pardon for his excess of genius. No man can possess genius with impunity. He knew that independence must be earned, and that no man should show his strength until he has acquired independence. This is why he died without peopling his wondrous air with more durable beings. But his canvas was gladdened with all the colors, sonorous with all the noise, and animated with life. In his contempt for the conventional and his happy use of gay colors, he was already as great as Goya. In the melancholy streets of Morocco he found the wrinkled old men whose dry and dark skins immortalized Ribera. Like Velasquez, he desired to win fame in the frank and serene representation of nature, but he had no wish to idealize it as was done in The Drunkards. Nor did he seek the grotesque as in The Maids of Honor, nor stoop to flattery, as Velasquez did in the portraits of the royal family. Fortuny wished to paint nature as it was.

His favorite masters were Velasquez, a painter of men, who lived at a time when other artists could paint saints alone; Ribera, a rancorous artist, who turned Naples into an encampment, and made his pupils into soldiers to defend his school, and who effaced the picture of a rival with corrosive oxides, and was accused of having murdered another, but who knew how to delineate his martyrs and monks with ferocious vigor drawn from nature; and Goya, the Martial of etching, who tried to kill war by making it horrible, and who killed the faded art existing in Spain at the beginning of this century.

While in Madrid studying the masters, Fortuny became a slave to the slavery that honors and makes happy. He was enslaved by a loving and honest woman. He loved the woman that he ought to have loved, a daughter, niece, and sister of painters. It was a love that gave him immense strength. He again visited Rome, and worked with unquestionable ardor. Hard work gave him a title to happiness. On his return to Spain he married his chosen bride. One of her brothers is the director of the Academy of San Fernando, where the great pictures of Goya are kept. Her uncle was a director of the Museum of Madrid, and her brothers, Raimundo and Ricardo Madrazo, were artists, the former a painter of charming women and sunlit gardens, and the other a sculptor who became a painter.

After his marriage Fortuny went back to Rome. He lived at the Place del Monte d'Oro, between the Tiber and the Trastevere, where the people still preserve the handsome Roman profile. He surrounded himself with treasures, especially friends. His studio was his salon. Idleness fatigued him. He worked while in conversation. Tapestry from Smyrna and Persia and the drapery of churches embroidered in gold covered the walls of his studio. Treasures of art were strewn over the room in picturesque disorder. Fresh flowers filled it with perfume. He always needed them. At 4 P.M. his doors were opened. The beloved Simonetti, whom he instructed with so much love and patience, and his old friend Moragas, who, like Simonetti, worked at the side of the master, came to see him. The wife also used the brush at her husband's right hand. Henri Regnault usually entered along with Clairin. He had a pensive air, as though thinking of his Salome. Next came the Princess Colonna, who studied water colors with Fortuny, oil painting with Regnault, and sculpture with Clésinger. After her came Ricardo Madrazo, the Princess Sill, and d'Epernay, and several good friends of Fortuny's youth, noisy customers of the Café Greco. Among them were those gifted Spaniards, Gisbert, who painted the Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers; Dioscoro Puebla, author of the Filles du Cid; Valles, who painted Queen Jeanne, who went mad with love; Casado, now at work at a great picture; and Rosales, the famous painter of the dying Queen Isabella the Catholic. All were there. The master was good and always smiling. The treasures of the studio were studied. All questions of art were discussed. They spoke beautifully of everything that was beautiful. The master did not follow the example of Michael Angelo, and pocket the keys of the studio. He worked in the presence of his friends, like Raphael. It was an assembly of worthy people. An egotist would have been unwelcome. Those who entered sad went out happy.

All Paris went to see Fortuny's Spanish Wedding. The master was ever a student. He painted everything that attracted his attention. He retained the impression of everything that he observed. Mme. Cassin has the picture of the Spanish Wedding and the Salome of Regnault in Paris. The Spanish Wedding is a romance, luxurious in color, and of exquisite finish. You can almost feel the soft air charged with incense floating over its shadows. The space is admirably filled. Apparently you can weigh the shade. The picture caused a sensation in the artistic world. It possesses all the qualities of Meissonier and Gérôme without any of their faults. They recognized the genius of the painter and became his friends. He remained in Paris, active, tranquil, loved, loving, and happy. He lived in his studio, repelling frivolity and accepting sincere society. Above all things, he himself was sincere. He detested those who wounded the modesty of talent. He refused to visit the Princess Mathilde, despite the earnest protestations of Alexander Dumas, but he was sometimes seen at the receptions of Walter Fol, who loved him and always spoke feelingly of him.

War came war that makes birds fly away. Everybody loves France, even to those who hate her. Grieving over her fate, Fortuny went to Granada. There he worked unceasingly, but without haste and without fatigue, for renown had brought him luxury and comfort. He chose his subjects. He looked deeper into the bosom of nature. He grouped upon his palette the colors of the Alhambra, where light shines upon white walls and polished pavement like a phosphorescent sea in the tropics. There he painted the Tribunal of the Cady, a picture so luminous as to be marvellous. He worked in the open air under a tent pitched in a corner of the courtyard of the old Moorish palace in which he lived. It was in such a yard that he placed his Fencing Lesson. In this painting a fencing master awaits the attack of his pupil, who in the lunge loses his balance. Other pupils await their turns. An old man is reading beyond the basin which separates him from the students. He has the face of a man of the nineteenth century. Two dogs, accustomed to the noise of the foils, lie at his feet. In the corridor, as in the corridor of the Moorish palace, paintings are suspended from the walls. A caged monkey is chattering near by. There is no elaboration of the strange light of gloomy edifices so perceptible in the Tribunal of the Cady. It is the placid work of a happy man.

In Granada, Fortuny gave himself up to the pleasures of study, of friendship, and of his family. He reveled in the antiquities of the Moors, whose buildings are so graceful that even in their ruins they seem new. He studied the flowers of stone, the laces of marble, and the delicate turrets piercing the blue sky. The most scrutinizing eye cannot detect a corner on the walls, pavements, or roofs of these fairy palaces without an ornament, nor can the hand be placed upon a point not carved or beautified. All the colors of the rainbow appear under the white marble, like the undulations of serpents. Here, in the presence of this coquettish ornamentation, the painter strengthened his detestation of the monotonous and his love of the accidents which enliven masses of color. He was perforce extremely elegant. He has shown elegance in the horrible in his sketch of the battle of VadRas, and he has also shown the elegance of wretchedness in the Serpent Charmer. He painted a pig rooting in the mud, but the pig was rooting beneath a blossoming chestnut tree. He painted rags, but he threw them over the body of a child. His creations are peculiarly charming. You cannot see the ruins of the old schools in them. The slow labor of elaboration and the forced originality which are seen in so many modern paintings are lacking here. He sought the beautiful because he could not produce the ugly. He had a grand simplicity and a sumptuous flexibility. When a dull tone threatened to prolong itself on his canvas, he banished it, for he could not suffer obscurity. He always enlivened the tone of a picture with an admirable touch with a red fan or a green bonnet. If he broke the clear blue sky with the ruins of a falling castle, he chastened the stain of shade by raising upon the broken stones in creeping ivy the colors and forces of life. In Granada he finished L'Osteria, a painting representing gay guests around a table, soldiers coming out of a grove, and dogs fighting for a bone. There he created the Mousquetaire on the march, fork and hat in hand, and musket on his back.

Fortuny began to tire of his isolation. His friends came to see him, one by one. One day it was Clairin, and the next day Simonetti or Tapiro. The guardian of his house in Rome died. He went there with Tapiro. He afterward returned for his wife and paintings. He saw the sunshine upon the rose-colored mountains of the Sierra Nevada for the last time. He went to Rome to die. He lived at the Via Flaminia. His house was a studio, and his studio a museum. He was a little sad, like all who from the earth begin to see heaven. He rarely entered into conversation. He painted the Academicians and the Model, a picture which created a school. Then he finished his last picture, the Academy of the Arcadians Listening to a New Tragedy. The sea is in the distance. The tragedy is presented in the open air and upon a carpet. At the right and left are little groves sprinkled with flowers. Grass covers the earth. In picturesque vestments and buckled shoes the academicians criticize the play beneath the odorous trees. It is joyous life and smiling nature. The analogy between the sentiments animating the picture and the colors with which they are expressed is admirable. It is the painting of a tranquil light, a life without thorns, a garden filled with roses.

Summer came. It was a summer of laurel bushes, orange groves, and fragrant lemon trees. Fortuny settled at the Villa Arata, near Naples. In profound reflection he listened to the music of the resplendent sea as it threw the crests of its waves upon the beach. He proposed a task for which he felt himself equal. His color was the bold use of all colors. His space was filled with densifying air which held the sun. His light was that which no other painter could place upon canvas the vapor of light. He had the grace of variety, the richness of ornamentation, and the science of movement. He never strained the power of expression. When much is to be done it is necessary to guard against doing too much. He was about to paint eternal nature in actual life, but without the chains of a school, although he himself had created a school by changing his style with his subjects. Servitude was repugnant. Death, apparently desirous of obliging its victim, vaguely announced its approach to give Fortuny time to leave in his last work the reflection of his superb dreams and the interior harmony of his soul. Happily, however, the painting was never finished. In its present condition it enables you to see that this work was so powerful that it was created by the first touch of his brush and the first introduction of color. Astonished painters cannot say that they do not know his secrets. His genius can readily be analyzed in the face of a painting so balanced, so harmonious, so unglaringly brilliant, so homely without being vulgar, so bold without being extravagant, so expressive without being finished, and yet the most finished of all his works. The picture is now in the Stewart gallery in this city. It is one of the richest pages that the genius of Europe has sent to America. It is placed at the side of the Serpent Charmer.

This unfinished painting, the Beach of Portici, is charming in its clearness. It shows a profound science of perspective. It has an interior meaning lacking in almost all of Fortuny's pictures. It represents his quiet home, among the flowers of sunlit nature. His wife is sewing. Another lady has thrown her parasol upon the white flowers and is looking at the sun, shading her eyes with her hand. It is both a natural movement and a happy method of breaking the prolonged lines of the figure. Children are gathering bluets, corn poppies, and yellow pumpkin flowers in a corner. With one and the same tint of color he brings out a child, a woman, a rose. For living things he has a gamut of colors, and for the inanimate his gamut is quite diverse, without being sombre. On looking at the unfinished parts of the picture you might fancy that he mounted into the clouds to study the birth and the elaboration of light. There is a long white wall on the left of the picture. In this simple subject he employed all his powers. The straight line is broken, the hardness softened, and the monotony lessened. As the wall is long, he interrupts it with massive stirrups. As it is still too long, he inserts a red door, and then tranquilly follows the white wall to a gate, through which you see the side of a house, the extremity of an arch, a street that is lost in the distance, a looming city, and the sky that covers it. A line so straight as that of the wall wounds his artistic sense, and he plants upon it a bush dotted with roses, and a tree with outstretching branches. At the edge of the canvas, where the wall assumes immense proportions, a morsel of gray sky troubles him, and he relieves the effect by introducing an isolated mossy mass. The gate leading to the city is as large as the two fingers of a child, and the pumpkin vines rolling at the feet of the seated woman are as large as the gate; and yet the effect is true. On one side there is a summer carriage with an impatient horse and a coachman waiting with a little more patience, the whole smaller than one of the children in the center of the canvas and yet a delineation of an actual fact. The woman who sews is almost as large as the cattle in the background, where the sea and the wall converge. You can mark with your finger the grade of the ground and the steps to be taken to go from the pumpkin vines to the cattle. The delicious little figures of the bathers on the beach are as large as the heads of the women in the center. The groundwork is a storm of colors, but a storm that sleeps. A Fortuny sky, greenish at the horizon, rises above the wall whose length has been conquered above the ground, above the banks of flowers, and above the limpid blue sea. It is as though everything should be shaded in the neighborhood of the earth and immaculate, serene, and sovereign on high.

Fortuny died in a treacherous autumn at Rome. He imprudently worked in the open air after the autumn rains. He lived in a rich but unwholesome quarter of the city. It was reported that he was killed in a duel. To a certain extent it was true. It was a duel with work. His assassin, however, was gastritis, which turned into a typhoid fever petty poisons that kill great men. Men ought to live in a world where the instrument of death is worthy of the man who dies. This is not such a world.

Thus lived and died the most sincere, the most original, the most humane of modern painters, and one of the most brilliant and most elegant of all times. In smiling and clear nature he is the painter of the century, but he would only have been recognized as the painter of air and light, were it not for his superb uncompleted work, the Beach of Portici.

J.M.

(The Sun, XLVII, 208 [Nueva York, 27 do marzo de 1881], p. 2, col. 3-6.)