The grave and truthful simplicity of his pictures is unsurpassed among the artistic records of any nation. His supreme effort was directed to the portrayal of Nature. With unerring judgment he selected the essential details of a composition, and painted them with unflinching fidelity. He depicted each colour precisely as the lighting of his canvas revealed it to him. He is the master of chiaroscuro, by the perfect unity of his tones. His style is wholly personal, his pictures bear pre-eminently the mark of individual expression. From his earliest youth this was his method of work. 'He kept,' Pacheco tells us, in the account he gives of his pupil and son-in-law, in his _Arte de la Pintura_, 'a peasant lad, as an apprentice, who served him as a study in different actions and postures--sometimes crying, sometimes laughing--till he had grappled with every difficulty of expression; and from him he executed an infinite variety of heads, in charcoal and chalk on blue paper, by which he arrived at certainty in taking likeness.' In this way did Velazquez train his power; and we are able to comprehend the wonderful portraits, which have rendered the House of Austria familiar to the world, when we picture the youth drawing his slave, again and yet again, in different attitudes and ever varied changes of expression. This, then, was the divergence between the methods of Velazquez and Murillo. The one painted Nature as she was; the other depicted men and women as they never could be, but in the guise of saints, according to the desires of the Catholic Church. It is in this dis-similarity of their aims, that we shall find the explanation of the fact, which cannot fail to impress the visitor to Seville, that, while the city abounds in the works of Murillo, no single picture from the hand of Velazquez is to be found in Cathedral, Church or Museo. The city of his birth is destitute of any commemoration of his genius, if we exclude a few pictures, of very doubtful authenticity, to be found in some of the private collections. The art of Seville was maintained by the munificence of the Church. Painting was the handmaid of the Catholic religion. Pictures were painted for the glory of God; they were valued as aids in the due performance of religious observance rather than as works of art. For the artist whose supreme desire was to follow truth Seville was no home. Realism was opposed to the very essence of the Catholic mind. The mediæval spirit did not exist in Velazquez, the most modern of all the old masters; he yearned for a freer and wider scope for the development of his genius. In March, 1621, Philip III. died, and was succeeded by his young son, Philip IV., who at once began to collect about the throne the literary and artistic genius of the day.