Word: velasquez
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Painters' Painter. Ironically, the basic elements of Rembrandt's painting-his superb brush stroke and bold handling of color, his insistence on psychological insight, his dramatic use of light and shadow-long kept him in eclipse. Though in his own day Velasquez thought nothing of borrowing a pose from Rembrandt's Negress Lying Down (he used it for his own Venus), Rembrandt's reputation became primarily the custody of painters in later generations. In their hands, Rembrandt's work has become one of the richest lodes in Western...
...18th and 19th centuries his landscapes influenced a whole generation of English painters. Sir Joshua Reynolds made copies of Rembrandt's paintings, and so did Gainsborough and Turner. Goya's studio had ten Rembrandt prints, to which Goya freely admitted his debt: "I have had three masters: Velasquez, Rembrandt, and nature." As the pendulum swung from classicism to romanticism in the 19th century, Delacroix seized on Rembrandt to best his classicist rival, Ingres, and wrote: "Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael...
...gentleman ever had to make his own bed. Traipsing from capital to capital with his parents and sisters, he grew into a sophisticated young man with a high collar beneath his full beard. He developed only one passion: painting, of the sort practiced long before by Frans Hals and Velasquez...
Both in style and in mood the picture echoes Velasquez' huge masterpiece, The Maids of Honor, at the Prado. But where Velasquez firmly persuades the eye to believe in the painted image, Sargent only beguiles it into a momentary suspension of disbelief. And Velasquez' reverent handling of the way light falls on objects becomes mere virtuosity in Sargent. The fortuitous manner in which Sargent's light picks his flowerlike figures out of the gloom smacks more of the theater than of life. Yet when all this has been said, it is true that no painter alive today...
...figure-full compositions; Vermeer took over and refined his trick of illuminating dim interiors with dramatic shafts of light; Rembrandt adapted to deeper use his habit of painting the faces of real people mysteriously veiled in shadow; Georges de La Tour appropriated his favored color scheme (red on black); Velasquez, the realest of realists, gained conviction from Caravaggio's absolute devotion to nature...