Copy after Velázquez “Portrait of a Dwarf with a Dog” 1896

Copy after Velázquez “Portrait of a Dwarf with a Dog” is one of several copies Reid made of paintings by the greatly admired Spanish artist Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). Both he and his wife, Mary Hiester Reid (1854–1921), considered this piece a significant achievement because of the effectiveness with which it replicated the original painting and thus demonstrated Reid’s comprehension of Velázquez’s skills.

Copying the work of other artists was a common practice, as it helped the copyist analyze how artists achieved their effects. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Velázquez was revered by a range of European and American artists, from John Ruskin (1819–1900) to Édouard Manet (1832–1883), James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), and John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), for a variety of reasons. These included his realistic treatment of his subjects, his mastery of subtle effects of light and atmosphere, and the sophistication of his restrained colour palette.

One of Velázquez’s greatest admirers was the French painter Léon Bonnat (1833–1922), who passed his adulation of the Spanish artist’s work on to his students, including Reid’s teachers Robert Harris (1849–1919) and Thomas Eakins (1844–1916). “What the Spanish master seeks above all are character and truth,” wrote Bonnat. “He paints nature as he sees her and as she is. The air he breathes is our own, his sky is that under which we live. His portraits impress us with the same feeling we have when in the presence of living beings.”

Eakins had spent six months in Spain in 1869 and 1870 after finishing his studies in Paris. When George and Mary Hiester Reid followed his example by studying the several Velázquez canvases in Madrid’s Prado Museum in 1896, they were as enthralled as Bonnat and Eakins had been. Hiester Reid’s three published accounts of their time in Spain praise Velázquez’s exquisite modelling, the intense psychological penetration of his portraits, his “perfect tone and beauty of color,” and his refusal to separate “the method of expression from the idea to be expressed.”  So profound was Velázquez’s impact on her husband that the catalogue for George Agnew Reid’s 1948 memorial exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario) named only three artists as having exercised a significant influence on him; the other two were Eakins and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898).

The esteem in which both George and Mary Hiester Reid held Copy after Velázquez “Portrait of a Dwarf with a Dog” led them to give it a prominent place on the walls of both their Toronto houses. It is visible in a 1906 photograph of the interior of their Indian Road home, as well as in Hiester Reid’s 1912 painting of the inglenook in her studio in Upland Cottage. Ironically, although the original Spanish canvas does emulate Velázquez’s ruthless realism, free brushwork, and occasional choice of dwarfs and jesters from the Spanish court as portrait subjects, it has since the 1950s been attributed to an anonymous mid-seventeenth-century imitator.