Page:Mexico, California and Arizona - 1900.djvu/141

 of the British Royal Academy which I saw in the first year of the presidency of Sir Frederick Leighton. This devotion to large academical ideas—the fortunes of Orestes, Regulus, and Belisarius—it is true, is a source of weakness rather than strength from the money point of view. The market of the time demands a domestic, genre, realistic, and not a grandiose art. The market for art of any kind in Mexico is extremely small. There are no government commissions farther than an occasional portrait or two, and enlightened patrons hardly exist. There are no pictures of consequence in the best Mexican houses. The predictions at Havana were not verified. The abundance of native talent receives little encouragement. Many a bright genius is forced to paint his inventions on the walls of pulque shops, and finally to quit the profession for lack of support.

The subjects are, for the most part, severely religious, in consonance with the taste of the wealthy convents, the patrons of art for whom they were originally painted. The series is in a declining order of merit chronologically. The earliest Mexican masters are the best. They came from Europe, contemporaries of Murillo, Ribera, the Caracci, trained in the splendid Renaissance period at its acme, and they left here works which do it no discredit. Mexico was a hundred years old already, and it was high time that art should arise when Baltazar Echave began, somewhat after the year 1600. There is a romantic tradition that it was his wife who first taught him to paint.

The genius of this early school is very decorative, and marked at once by refinement of sentiment, breadth, and vigor. It delights in rich stuffs and patterns, in the glitter of plate and weapons. It fills up all portions of the canvas symmetrically, and colors with a subdued richness. I recall a St. Ildefonso, by Luis Juarez, as