To this period may be also assigned the _Christ at the Column_ in the National Gallery, a picture which though not at first sight attractive, is nevertheless as fine in technique, and in sentiment, as any other picture in the Spanish room, and deserves far more attention than is usually given to it. Its simple realism and its pathetic sweetness are qualities which are wanting in many a more showy or sensational composition, and the more it is studied the nearer we find we are getting to the real excellences that distinguish Velasquez from any painter who has ever lived. The _Crucifixion_ at the Prado is perhaps more wonderful, but the familiar subject helps the imagination of the spectator to admire it, whereas the unfamiliar setting of our picture is apt at first sight to repel. The most important composition undertaken by Velasquez in this middle period of his career--that is to say between his two visits to Italy in 1629 and 1649--is the famous _Surrender of Breda_, or, as it is sometimes called, _The Lances_. Soon after his arrival in Madrid he had once painted an historical subject, _The Expulsion of the Moors_, in competition with his rivals who had asserted that he could paint nothing but heads. In this competition the prize was awarded to him, but as the picture has perished we are unable to judge of its merits for ourselves. But apart from this, and such unimportant groups of figures as we have mentioned, he had been occupied wholly in painting single portraits, and it is a marvellous proof of his genius that he should produce such a masterpiece of composition as _The Lances_ with so little practice in this branch of his art. Here, at least, we might have expected to trace the influence of Rubens, but there is actually no sign of it; and if he sought any inspiration at all from other painters, it was from what he recalled of Tintoretto's work which he had seen and studied in Venice.