The King, his Queen, the two royal brothers, and Olivares, had all a passion for having portraits taken of themselves. Philip was born for a sitter. His face, as Dr. Waagen remarks, “is better known than his history.” His pale Flemish complexion, Austrian features, and fair hair have been many times depicted by Rubens and Velasquez. He was sometimes painted on his Andalusian courser, sometimes in black velvet, as he was going to the council--even at his prayers. There was an hereditary gift of silence and composure in his race: in Philip the attribute was so signal, that he could witness a whole comedy without stirring hand or foot, and conduct an audience without a muscle moving, except those in his lips and tongue.[145] Even after slaying the bull of Xarama, famed for strength and fierceness, not for a moment did he change countenance. To this incomparable staidness and dignity was added the advantage of a tall figure, which Philip knew well how to set off by a perfect mastery in combination of colours. Black he mixed almost uniformly with white, and gold and silver. This stately monarch was never known to smile more than three times in his life--that is, publicly, for in private he was ever “full of merry discourses.” Footnote 145: Waagen, p. 62. From "Voyage en Espagne"--Cologne, 1662. Thus, taste, letters in every branch, the noblest works of architecture and sculpture, were the themes of a court where those who had left behind them the pedantry and vulgarity of King James arrived in the vigour of youth and intellect. Velasquez was painting a portrait of the King, and one also of the Infant, Don Fernando, when Charles and Buckingham arrived at Madrid, and interrupted, by their presence and the ceremonials of their reception, the completion of these pictures. The astonished Prince and his favourite found themselves transformed into a region hitherto scarcely dreamed of, yet which they were, by natural refinement of taste, well calculated to enter. They had left King James hunting in a ruff and bombasted garments; that King hated novelties. “It was as well,” Horace Walpole remarks, “that he had no disposition to the arts, but let them take their own course, for he might have introduced as bad a taste into them as he did into literature.” Walpole attributes, likewise, the absence of pictures in the houses of the English nobility at this period to the great size and height of the rooms which they erected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when vastness seems to have constituted the idea of grandeur. Pictures would have been lost in rooms of such height, which were better calculated for tapestry; and he offers, as an instance, Hardwicke--which was furnished for the reception and imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots--and Audley-End, as proofs of the prodigious space covered by a modern gentleman’s house in the days of James I., and observes how impossible it would have been to place pictures in such structures.