Velasquez (1599-1660) is the greatest name in the history of Spanish painting. With him Spanish art took upon itself a decidedly naturalistic and national stamp. Before his time Italy had been freely imitated; but though Velasquez himself was in Italy for quite a long time, and intimately acquainted with great Italian art, he never seemed to have been led away from his own individual way of seeing and doing. He was a pupil of Herrera, afterward with Pacheco, and learned much from Ribera and Tristan, but more from a direct study of nature than from all the others. He was in a broad sense a realist--a man who recorded the material and the actual without emendation or transposition. He has never been surpassed in giving the solidity and substance of form and the placing of objects in atmosphere. And this, not in a small, finical way, but with a breadth of view and of treatment which are to-day the despair of painters. There was nothing of the ethereal, the spiritual, the pietistic, or the pathetic about him. He never for a moment left the firm basis of reality. Standing upon earth he recorded the truths of the earth, but in their largest, fullest, most universal forms. Technically his was a master-hand, doing all things with ease, giving exact relations of colors and lights, and placing everything so perfectly that no addition or alteration is thought of. With the brush he was light, easy, sure. The surface looks as though touched once, no more. It is the perfection of handling through its simplicity and certainty, and has not the slightest trace of affectation or mannerism. He was one of the few Spanish painters who were enabled to shake off the yoke of the Church. Few of his canvases are religious in subject. Under royal patronage he passed almost all of his life in painting portraits of the royal family, ministers of state, and great dignitaries. As a portrait-painter he is more widely known than as a figure-painter. Nevertheless he did many canvases like The Tapestry Weavers and The Surrender at Breda, which attest his remarkable genius in that field; and even in landscape, in _genre_, in animal painting, he was a very superior man. In fact Velasquez is one of the few great painters in European history for whom there is nothing but praise. He was the full-rounded complete painter, intensely individual and self-assertive, and yet in his art recording in a broad way the Spanish type and life. He was the climax of Spanish painting, and after him there was a rather swift decline, as had been the case in the Italian schools.