We have alluded to the manner of Velázquez’s appearance in Seville and the influences under which he commenced his apprenticeship. A multitude of studies seriously executed, some in black chalk, some in colour, were his first essays. While still a youth he painted a number of those works which still astonish by their reality, by their masterly drawing--a quality with which he was naturally endowed--by their sculptural relief, and by their sobriety. Two works may serve as typical of these, both well-known in England, where they now are, _The Old Woman Frying Eggs_ in Sir Herbert Cook’s collection, and the _Water-Carrier of Seville_, the property of the Duke of Wellington, which we quote as an example of the style and resolution which the artist bestowed during these years upon works of a popular character, and which, to judge from its subject and models, was then a novelty in a school of painting which had produced scarcely anything except portraits and paintings of a religious kind. Other works of a naturalistic tendency, vulgarly called _bodegones_, or “eating-house” sketches, and some of a religious character, complete the production of those first years of Velázquez, which was so limited in his later years, that he must be described as a painter whose output was relatively small. When the artist was twenty-four years of age, his father-in-law, Pacheco, a man of influence, advised him to leave Seville, and himself introduced him to the Court of Philip IV, in whose service Velázquez remained for the rest of his life. He was immediately granted a position and salary at the Court, and his first portraits of the Sovereign and members of the Royal Family aroused surprise and admiration. These, and his first subject compositions painted in Madrid, especially that known as _Los Borrachos_ (“The Topers”), in their high excellence show the culmination of all the qualities found in the works painted in Seville during his first years of apprenticeship. Never has the Spanish picaresque spirit, which forms such a brilliant page in the literature of those times, been given a more genuine representation than is to be observed in the canvas just mentioned. If Velázquez had died after painting _Los Borrachos_, this work alone would have sufficed to have given him supremacy and the title of leader of a school previously indefinite and lacking a fixed and individual point of view. A little later, at the command of his King, Velázquez went for the first time to Italy. The influence which Italian art exercised upon him has been the subject of discussion. It is not possible in an essay such as this to try to elucidate this point, but it appears manifest that if Italian art was naturally absorbed by his talent, it did not greatly affect his native qualities; and to judge from his subsequent work, it would seem that he showed a constant and single-minded solicitude to achieve an interpretation always actively faithful to nature.