So gradually one becomes conscious of the loveliness of color that permeates the whole group, a bouquet of mingled quietude and brilliance, of low tones and sparkling keys, which one can enjoy with as complete a detachment from any thought of the figures, as if they were a parterre of flowers. In fact, there is revealed here a colorist of extraordinary refinement and subtlety; and of an imagination that is rare among painters. Goya’s original fondness for varied and positive colors has matured into a mastery over a few hues, treated with exquisite nuances. And the secret of this marvelous color-expression is the artist’s new way of looking at his subject. He has become an impressionist in the modern sense. He stands forth, indeed, as the first of modern impressionists, the forerunner by nearly a hundred years of the principal art-motive of the nineteenth century. * * * * * Goya used to say that his only teachers had been Velasquez, Rembrandt and Nature. It was from the first named that he learned to paint, not the subject in front of him but the impression he had formed of it; and in this he may have been assisted by Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro to eliminate by shadow the unessentials and to heighten the saliencies by light. Yet it is difficult to understand how Goya could have had many opportunities of studying Rembrandt, since there is only a single example in the Prado, and the Dutch masters were not favored in Spain. Accordingly one is disposed to give Goya fuller credit for discovering his own way of rendering his impressions. As it is exhibited in this portrait group, it reveals an imagination that heightens the suggestion of beauty in the thing recorded, and an extraordinary gift of improvisation in handling passages of intricate detail and rendering the effect of an ensemble. There is no such maze of luxuriant loveliness as this in any picture by Velasquez; the nearest approach to it being, perhaps, the breast of the little Don Carlos on horseback. The Goya represents a more feminine sensitiveness; it is impregnated with temperament. This is the quality of Goya’s impressionism which makes it modern. Velasquez’s is impersonally objective; modern impressionism, like Goya’s, is naturalism viewed through temperament; it shapes and colors the record to the artist’s mood.