Like French art, Spanish art, after Goya's death, had borne the yoke of Classicism, Romanticism, and academical influence by turns. In the grave of Goya there was buried for ever, as it seemed, the world of torreros, majas, manolas, monks, smugglers, knaves, and witches, and all the local colour of the Spanish Peninsula. As late as the Paris World Exhibition of 1867, Spain was merely represented by a few carefully composed, and just as carefully painted, but tame and tedious, historical pictures of the David or the Delaroche stamp--works such as had been painted for whole decades by José Madrazo, J. Ribera y Fernandez, Federigo Madrazo, Carlo Luis Ribera, Eduardo Rosales, and many others whose names there is no reason for rescuing from oblivion. They laboured, meditating an art which was not their own, and could not waken any echo in themselves. Their painting was body without soul, empty histrionic skill. As complete darkness had rested for a century over Spanish art, from the death of Claudio Coellos in 1693 to the appearance of Goya, rising like a meteor, so the first half of the nineteenth century produced no single original artist until Fortuny came forward in the sixties. He grew up amid poor surroundings, and when he was twelve years of age he lost his father and mother. His grandfather, an enterprising and adventurous joiner, had made for himself a cabinet of wax figures, which he exhibited from town to town in the province of Tarragona. With his grandson he went on foot through all the towns of Catalonia, the old man showing the wax figures which the boy had painted. Whenever he had a moment free the latter was drawing, carving in wood, or modelling in wax. It chanced, however, that a sculptor saw his attempts, spoke of them in Fortuny's birthplace, and succeeded in inducing the town to make an allowance of forty-two francs a month to a lad whose talent had so much promise. By these means Fortuny was enabled to attend the Academy of Barcelona for four years. In 1857, when he was nineteen years of age, he received the _Prix de Rome_, and set out for Rome itself in the same year. But whilst he was copying the pictures of the old masters there a circumstance occurred which set him upon another course. The war between Spain and the Emperor of Morocco determined his future career. Fortuny was then a young man of three-and-twenty, very strong, rather thick-set, quick to resent an injury, taciturn, resolute, and accustomed to hard work. His residence in the East, which lasted from five to six months, was a discovery for him--a feast of delight. He found the opportunity of studying in the immediate neighbourhood a people whose life was opulent in colour and wild in movement; and he beheld with wonder the gleaming pictorial episodes so variously enacted before him, and the rich costumes upon which the radiance of the South glanced in a hundred reflections. And, in particular, when the Emperor of Morocco came with