Promises were sent to the young painter that he should be commissioned to portray the King and his brother; but the King's work and play, more momentarily pressing, still delayed the anticipated honour until the end of August, when Philip, on his prancing charger--for the King was a splendid and intrepid horseman--carracoled in the garden of the palace before the grave, lean young painter {199} with the jet black hair and flashing Andaluz eyes, who for the first time fixed there upon canvas the face and form which his genius was to immortalise. Philip was a good judge of art, and when he saw the picture, though no muscle of his impassive face moved, he expressed his satisfaction with courteous condescension. Olivares, vehement as usual, and proud that a Sevillian should have succeeded, swore that no one else had ever painted the King as he was, and that in future Diego Velazquez alone should paint his Majesty. When the last touch was given to it, the great life-sized equestrian portrait of Philip was exhibited upon the pavement opposite Liars' Walk, not for sale, but for the astonishment and delight of loyal Madrileños.[21] Diego Velazquez's fortune was made. Within a few weeks he was appointed Court painter, with a salary of twenty ducats a month, with extra payment for each picture and a studio in the palace, and thenceforward pensions and favours of all sorts testified to Olivares' pride in his fellow-countryman and the King's recognition of a genius. From the time of the great Emperor and his son the tradition had existed that intimate familiarity was permissible between the King of Spain and those household servants whom he cared thus to honour. Both the Emperor and Philip II. had allowed the greatest liberty to their jesters, dwarfs, and body servants, and had extended their friendship to the artist craftsmen who had served them. Philip IV. bettered the instruction, for he at heart was a poet and an artist himself; and whilst he {200} delighted in the company of clever people generally, he distinguished with life-long regard and considerate kindness the young artist, only a few years older than himself, who did so much to ennoble and illustrate his Court. In Velazquez's studio in the palace a leather armchair was always kept sacred for the King, who was wont to come in unannounced when the fancy seized him, and watch the painter at work. Indeed, during his stay in Madrid he hardly missed a day in his visits, and would often come accompanied by his wife to the studio. There he witnessed, gradually growing under the magic brush, the counterfeit presentments of those who made up his life, his wives, brothers, and children, the latter in their chubby babyhood, stiff with irksome splendour; the distorted and deformed beings who ministered to the merriment of those whose surroundings were otherwise far from merry; the poets who solaced his life, the women he loved, the famous