The Old Masters and Their Pictures

growth and was only developed after long pauses, it made up for its slowness and delays by the burst of trium

habits, had been compelled to leave Antwerp in consequence of religious disturbances which broke out there about the time that the northern provinces, more at one and more decided in their union than the southern provinces, established their independence. Rubens spent his early boyhood at Cologne,

years of age. He was eight years absent, entering the service of the ducal sovereign of Mantua, being sent by him on a diplomatic mission to Madrid to Philip III,

attend the death-bed of his mother, from whom he had parted eight years before; and arriving too late to see her in life. A man

m to relinquish his idea, and establish himself in his native Antwerp. He was already a man of eminence in his profession, and a man of mark out of it. Go where he would he made friends, and he so recommended himself to his royal patrons by his natural suavity, tact, and sagacity, that he was not only in the utmost favour with them as a right courtly painter, but was employed by them, once and ag

pictures by the Italian masters, antique gems, &c. &c., already gathered abroad. He set himself to keep house in a liberal fashion, to dispense benefits, and to entertain friends-above all, to paint with might and main in company with his great school, the members of which, like those of Raphael's school where Rapha

e girl, I went occasionally to a country house, the show place of the neighbourhood, where there were copies of this series of Rubens' pictures. I can remember yet looking at them with utter bewilderment, caused by the dubious taste that impelled Rubens to indulge in the oddest mixture of royal personages, high church dignitaries

s beauty was of a finer order than that of her successor, expressing larger capacity of affection and intellect. But on Helena Fourment Rubens doted, while to both women he seems to have been affectionately attached. He has painted them so often, that the face of no painter's wife is so familiar to the art world, and even to the greater world without, as are the

p. But the hand of premature disease and death, which not even he could resist, was already on the great painter; his constitution had been undermined by repeated attacks of gout, and he died at the age of sixty years, in 1640. He was the possessor of great wealth at the time o

h of bravado and too much of débonnaireté in the traits. His features are handsome in their Flemish fulness, and match well with hazel eyes, chestnut hair, and a ruddy complexion; his long moustache is turned up, and he wears the pointed beard which we see so often in the portraits by Rubens' scholar, Van

consummate excellence lay in his execution and colouring. It is brought as a reproach against his painting, that his noblest characters, even his sacred characters, were but big, brawny, red and white Flemings. His imagination only reached a cer

ose geniality bordered on joviality, and whose age was a grosser age tha

nd some of his predecessors I should like t

nd wept in his olive shade, there was different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders:-wild seas to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay; careful breeding of the stout hor

loughmen and reapers still). And are we to suppose there is no nobility in Rubens' masculine and universal sympathy with all this, and with his large human rendering of it, gentleman though he was by birth, and feeling, and education, and place, and, when he chose, lordly in conception also? He had his faults-perhaps great and lament

t are at Munich, where, in one great saloon and cabinet, there are ninety-five pictures by Rubens. In England, at Blenheim, there are fifteen pictures by Rubens, as

the picture, has been regarded as a bold artistic venture. An enthusiastic admirer has called it 'a most wonderful monument of the daring genius of the painter. The grandest picture in the world for composition, drawing, an

guish of that

lips! let that t

not wit

ubens was painting it, and that Van Dyck remedied the accident by re-

of the Virgin,' it is said that he painted it in sixteen days, for si

on which she stands, is writhing beneath her feet. God the Father is extending his protecting sceptre over her from above. The archangel, clothed in armour, is in fearful combat with the seven-headed dragon, which is endeavouring to devour the child. Alth

famous mythological pictures is the 'Battle of the Amazons,' now at Munich. 'The women are driven back by the Greeks over the river Thermodon; two horses are in savage combat on the bridge; one Amazon is torn from her horse

he picture absolutely glows with genial fire. The forms in it are more slender than is general with Rubens. Among the companions of Proserpine the figure of Diana is cons

paintings of children. Perhaps the most beautiful is t

is a king of beasts checked in his fiercest wrath. It is said to have been painted by Rubens in a fit of pique at a false report which had been c

f a master of painting, and a true lover of nature under every aspect, who can indeed distinguish, under the most ordinary aspect, those hidden treasures which all but a

ds and moustaches, in turned-over collars, ruffs and fur-trimmed robes, having books and pens, a dog, and a classic bust as accessories. The open pillar

inces, and that she died young and unmarried. Connoisseurs value the picture because of the triumph of skill by which Rubens has painted brilliantly a face so much in the shade; to those who are not connoisseurs I imagine the picture must speak for itself,

self an art collector, so far humoured the Earl in his taste as to present him with Lord Somerset's forfeited collection, valued at a thousand pounds. But Charles I, and the Earl became rival collectors, and little love was lost between them. The Earl of Arundel impairing even his great revenues in the pursuit, employed agents and ambassadors-notably Petty and Evelyn-all over Europe, to obtain for him drawings, pictures, ancient marbles, gems, &c. &c. When the civil wars broke out, Lord Arundel conveyed his priceless

s. One by Van Somer, in which the hero is pointing somewhat comically with his truncheon to the statues of his collection in the background, and the last one projected by Van Dyck, but executed by

tess is seated in a chair of state, with one hand on the head of a white greyhound; she wears a black satin gown, laced ruff, gold bracelets, and pearl necklace. Her hair is light, and decked with pearls and plumes. The Earl stands behind with a hand on her chair. His head is uncovered, the short hair inclining to grey; the whisk

bines,' and the landscape 'Autumn,' which has a view of his country chateau, de Stein, near Mechlin. In Dulwich Gallery there is

a miller or maltster, and there is a theory that Rembrandt acquired some of his effects of light and shade from the impressions made up

mbrandt's re-marriage, was to pass to her children, a provision that in the end wrought Rembrandt's ruin. The troubles of his country in the painter's time rendered his prices comparatively small and precarious, and Rembrandt, like Rubens, without R

ver very ample, and the painter, after struggling with his difficulties, became a bankrupt in 1656. His son took possession of Rembrandt's house, and from the sale of the painter's art collection and other resources eventually recovered his mother's fortune, but Rembrandt himself never rose above the misery,

ntrasted as the painters of light and of da

is heavy and stolid-seeming enough to be that of a typical Dutchman. The eye-brows are slightly knit over the broad nose; the full lips are scantily shaded by a moustache; there is no hair on

n looking at Rembrandt's pictures is traceable to this influence. It is in scenes by fire-light, camp-light, torch-light, that he triumphs, and his somewhat grim but very real romance owes its origin to the endless suggestions of the deep black shadows which belong to these artificial lights. There is this objection to be urged to the theory, that Rembrandt was also a good painter of his own flat Dutch landscape, painting it, however, rather under the sombre dim

in the act of stabbing in the back the unconscious man in the foreground. 25 Rembrandt's originality is as undoubted as his ability, and he was as great in etching as in painting. His defect as a painter was the frequent absence of any evidence in his work of a sense of refinement, grace, or even beauty; this can be sa

d son. David the elder was born at Antwerp in 1582, and David the younger also at Antwerp, in 1610. David the younger is decidedly the more eminent painter, though the works of the

ubens, with whom David Teniers was on terms of friendly intimacy. There Teniers, like his great associate, lived in the utmost state and bounty, entertaining the noblest of the land. David Teniers married twice, his first wi

n 1649; the younger died at Brussel

and ask no more, the Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking that underlying strain of life, the mere rugged genuineness of the Teniers' work recommends itself, and is not without its own pathos; while to very many superficial observers the simple homeliness of the life which the Teniers chose to represent, prevents the observers from missing what should

rs, was tempted by his want of success to abjure his art, and even went so far, according to tradition, as to burn his studies and sketches, in order to prevent his son pursuing the career which had b

ouch of sentiment. His scenes are commonly 'road-side inns, hunts, fights;' but along with an inclination to adopt a higher class of actors-knights and ladies, instead of peasants-there is a more refined treatment and a dash of tende

he was a great landscape painter, and has given delight to thousands by his power of expressing his own love of na

of truth Claude is the inferior. Besides Cuyp's landscapes, he painted portraits, and what is called 'still life' (dead game, fruit or flower pieces, &c.), but Cuyp's triumph was found in his skies, with their 'clearness and coolness,' and in 'expressions of

ologized before now for not having studied sufficiently in Covent Garden to be provided with terms of correct and classical criticism. One of my friends begged me to observe, the other day, that Claude was "pulpy;" another added the yet more gratifying information that he was "juicy;" and it is

e, by painting for Prince Maurice of Nassau that which continues his most renowned, though probably not his best picture, his 'Young Bull,' for some time in the Louvre, now restored to the painter's native country, and placed in the Museum at the Hague. This picture is considered nearly faultless as a vigorous, if somewhat coarse, representation of animal

entioned, are beyond description. I would have you look at them for yourselves, where they are well represented, in the Dulwich Gallery; I would have you notice also how, as travellers declare of the splendour of tropical flowers, that they are deficient in the tender sweetness and grace of our more sober-tinted and les

e in England, I am sorry that my space will not suffer me to give a few special words to other famous painters of these