Chapter 11

HOLBEIN, 1494-1543--VAN DYCK, 1599-1641--LELY, 1618-1680--CANALETTO, 1697-1768--KNELLER, 1646-1723.

Hans Holbein, sometimes entitled Hans the Younger, was born at Augsburg about 1494 or 1495. He was the son of a painter, and belonged to a family of painters, one or more of whom had preceded Hans Holbein in leaving Augsburg, and taking up his residence at Basle. There Holbein was under the patronage of, and on terms of friendly intercourse with, the great scholar Erasmus. One bad result proceeded from this friendly familiarity, that of establishing or originating the charge that Holbein, as a young man, at least, was coarse and dissipated in his habits. The evidence is sufficiently curious. There is still in existence the copy of a Latin book, called the 'Praise of Folly,' written by Erasmus, which Holbein, not being a scholar, could not have read for himself, but which, according to tradition, Erasmus himself, or some other friend, read to him, while Holbein was so delighted with the satire that he covered the margin of the book with illustrative sketches. (The sketches remain, and are unmistakably Holbein's.) Opposite a passage, recording the want of common sense and energy in many learned men, Holbein had drawn the figure of a student, and written below, '_Erasmus_.' The book coming again into the hands of Erasmus, he was offended with the liberty taken by the painter., and sought to retaliate in kind by writing below the sketch of a rude boor drinking, '_Holbein_.' In spite of the rough jesting, the friendship between scholar and painter was not interrupted.

In these early days Holbein sometimes practised painting on glass, after the example of some of his kinsmen. At Basle, Holbein painted what is considered his finest work, the 'Meier Madonna,' now at Darmstadt, with a copy in the Dresden Gallery, and there he executed the designs for his series of woodcuts of the 'Dance of Death.'

At Basle Holbein married, while still a young man. The presumption that the painter's marriage, like that of his countryman, Albert Dürer, was unhappy, has rested on the foundation that he left his wife and her children behind when he repaired to England, and that although he re-visited Basle, and saw his wife and family, they did not return with him to England. A fancied confirmation to the unhappiness of the marriage is found in the expression of the wife in a portrait which Holbein painted of her and his children when he was at Basle. 'Cross-looking and red-eyed,' one critic calls the unlucky woman; another describes her as 'a plain, coarse-looking, middle-aged woman,' with an expression 'certainly mysterious and unpleasant.' Holbein's latest biographer[36] has proved that the forsaken wife, Elssbeth Schmid, was a widow with one son when Holbein married her, and has conjectured that she was probably not only older than Holbein, but in circumstances which rendered her independent of her husband. So far the critic has done something to clear Hans Holbein from the miserable accusation often brought against him, that he abandoned his wife and children to starve at Basle, while he sunned himself in such court favour as could be found in England. But, indeed, while Hans Holbein may have been honest and humane enough to have been above such base suspicions, there is no trace of him which survives that goes to disprove the probability that he was a self-willed, not over-scrupulous man, if he was also a vigorous and thorough worker.

Holbein came to England about 1526 or 1527, when he must have been thirty-one or thirty-two years of age, and repaired to Chelsea to the house of Sir Thomas More, to whom the painter brought a letter of introduction, and still better credentials in the present, from Erasmus to More, of the portrait of Erasmus, painted by Hans Holbein. There are so many portraits and copies of portraits of Erasmus, not only by Holbein, but by other painters--for Erasmus was painted by Albert Dürer and Quintin Matsys,--that this special portrait, like the true Holbein family portrait of the More family, remains very much a subject of speculation. Most of us must be well acquainted with the delightful account which Erasmus gave of Sir Thomas More's country-house at Chelsea, and the life of its occupants. It has been cited hundreds of times as an example of what an English family has been, and what it may be in dutiful discipline, simple industry, and high cultivation, when Sir Thomas's young daughters repeated psalms in Latin to beguile the time in the drudging process of churning the butter. During Holbein's residence in or visits to the Mores' house at Chelsea, he sketched or painted the original of the More family picture.

Holbein was introduced to Henry VIII, by Sir Thomas More, and was immediately taken into favour by the king, and received into his service, with a lodging in the palace, a general salary of thirty pounds a year, and separate payment for his paintings. According to Horace Walpole, Holbein's palace lodging was probably 'the little study called the new library' of square glazed bricks of different colours, designed by the painter at Whitehall. (This gateway, with the porch at Wilton, were the painter's chief architectural achievements.) By another statement, Holbein's house was on London Bridge, where it was destroyed in the great fire.

I have already alluded to the anecdote of the value which Henry VIII, put on Holbein. It was to this effect: that when an aggrieved courtier complained to the king that the painter had taken precedence of him--a nobleman, the king replied, 'I have many noblemen, but I have only one Hans Holbein.' In fact, Holbein received nothing save kindness from Henry VIII.; and for that matter, there seemed to be something in common between bluff King Hal and the equally bluff German Hans. But on one occasion Hans Holbein was said to have run the risk of forfeiting his imperious master's favour by the too favourable miniature which the painter was accused of painting of Anne of Cleves.

At Henry's court Holbein painted many a member of the royal family, noble and knight, and English gentleman and lady. His fortune had made him a portrait painter, but he was fully equal to other branches of art, as shown by his 'Meier Madonna,' and still more by the designs which have been preserved of his famous allegory of 'the Triumphs of Riches and Poverty,' painted for the hall of the Easterling Steelyard, the quarters of the merchants of Allemagne, then traders in London. In addition to painting portraits Holbein designed dagger hilts, clasps, cups, as some say after a study of the goldsmith's work of Cellini.

For a long time it was believed that Hans Holbein died after Mary Tudor succeeded to the English throne; indeed, some said that his death had been occasioned or hastened by that change in the affairs of men, which compelled him to quit his lodgings in the palace to make room for 'the new painter,' Sir Antony More, who came in the suite of Mary's well-beloved husband, Philip of Spain. There was even a theory, creditable to Hans Holbein, drawn from this conclusion, that he might have adopted the Protestant views of his late gracious master, and have stood by them stoutly, and so far forfeited all recognition from the bitter Catholic Mary. But, unfortunately for the tradition and theory, and for the later pictures attributed to Hans Holbein, his will has been discovered, and that quite recently, proving, from the date of its administration, his death of the plague (so far only the tradition had been right), when yet only in his forty-eighth year, as early as 1543, four years before the death of Henry VIII. In spite of court patronage Holbein did not die a rich man, and there is an impression that he was recklessly improvident in his habits.

Holbein had re-visited Basle several times, and the council had settled on him a pension of fifty florins a year, provided he would return and reside in Basle within two years, while his wife was to receive a pension of forty florins a year during Holbein's two years' absence. Holbein did not comply with the terms of the settlement. About the time of his death his son Philip, then a lad of eighteen, was a goldsmith in Paris. Of Hans Holbein's portraits I have two to draw from; one, painted in his youth at Basle, shows the painter in an open doublet, and curious stomacher-like shirt, and having on his head a great flapping hat. His face is broad and smooth-skinned, with little hair seen, and the features, the eyes especially, rather small for such an expanse of cheek and chin. The other picture of Holbein to which I have referred belongs certainly to a considerably later period of his life, and represents him with short but bushy hair, and short bushy beard and moustache, a man having a broad stout person with a mixture of dauntlessness and _bonhommie_ in his massive face.

Mr Ruskin says of Holbein, as a painter, that he was complete in intellect; what he saw he saw with his whole soul, and what he painted he painted with his whole might.

In deep and reverential feeling Holbein was far behind his countryman Albert Dürer, but Holbein was far more fully furnished than Dürer (unless indeed as Albrecht Dürer showed himself in that last picture of 'the Apostles') in the means of his art; he was a better draughtsman in the maturity of his powers, and a far better colourist. For Hans Holbein was not more famous for the living truthfulness of his likenesses ('a man very excellent in making physiognomies'), than for the 'inimitable bloom' that he imparted to his pictures, which 'he touched, till not a touch became discernible.' Yet beneath this bloom, along with his truthfulness, there was a dryness and hardness in Holbein's treatment of his subjects, and he is far below Titian, Rubens, and even Rembrandt as a portrait painter.

Holbein was in the habit of painting his larger portraits on a peculiar green, and his miniatures on a blue background. He drew his portrait sketches with black and red chalk on a paper tinted flesh-colour. It is said, that with the exception, of Philip Wouwermann, no painter has been so unfortunate in having the works of other painters attributed to him as Hans Holbein has been, and 'that three out of every four pictures ascribed to him are misnamed.'[37]

The 'Meier, or Meyer Madonna,' is otherwise called 'the Meier Family adoring the infant Christ in the arms of the Virgin.' The subject is understood to prove that it must have been painted in Holbein's youth, before Protestantism was triumphant at Basle. The figures are the Burgomaster Meier and his wife, whom Holbein painted twice; their son, with a little boy _nude_ beside him; another woman, elderly, conjectured to be a grandmother of the family, and beside her the young daughter of the house. In the centre on a turkey carpet stands the Madonna, holding in her arms an infant stretching out its left hand to the group of worshippers. In course of time, and in its transfer from hand to hand, a doubt has arisen with regard to the subject of this picture. Some critics have regarded it as a votive picture dedicated in a private chapel to commemorate the recovery from sickness or the death of a child. This conjecture seems to rest mainly on the fact, that the child in the Dresden copy (it is said to be otherwise in the Darmstadt picture) is of an aspect so sickly, as to have given rise to the impression that it represented an ailing, or even a dead child, and no glorious child Christ. Critics have gone still farther, and imagined that the child is a figure of the soul of a dead child (souls were sometimes painted by the old painters as new-born children), or of the soul of the elder and somewhat muffled-up woman who might have been recently dead. Mr Ruskin regards the picture as an offering for the recovery of a sick child, and thus illustrates it:

'The received tradition respecting the Holbein Madonna is beautiful, and I believe the interpretation to be true. A father and a mother have prayed to her for the life of their sick child. She appears to them, her own child Christ in her arms; she puts down her child beside them, takes their child into her arms instead; it lies down upon her bosom, and stretches its hand to its father and mother, saying farewell.'

Yet another much more prosaic and less attractive interpretation of the picture has been suggested by Holbein's biographer, that the two children may represent the same child. The child standing by his brother may be the boy restored to health, the feeble child in the arms of the Virgin may indicate the same child in its sickness, while the extended arm may point to the seat of the disease in an arm broken or injured. After all, the child may simply be a child Christ, marred in execution. I have given this dispute at length, because I think it is interesting, and, so far as I know, unique in reference to such a picture. By an odd enough mistake this very picture was once said to be the famous More Family picture.

The idea of the 'Dance of Death' did not originate with Holbein, neither is he supposed to have done more than touch, if he did touch, the paintings called the 'Dance of Death,' on the wall of the Dominican burial-ground, Basle, painted long before Holbein's day, by the order of the council after the plague visited Basle, and considered to have for its meaning simply a warning of the universality of death. But Holbein certainly availed himself of the older painting, to draw from it the grim satire of his woodcuts. Of these there are thirty-seven designs, the first, 'The Creation;' the second, 'Adam and Eve in Paradise;' the third, 'The Expulsion from Paradise;' the fourth, 'Adam Tilling the Earth;' the fifth, 'The Bones of all People;' till the dance really begins in the sixth. Death, a skeleton, as seen through the rest of the designs, sometimes playing on a guitar or lute, sometimes carrying a drum, bagpipes, a dulcimer, or a fiddle, now appearing with mitre on head and crozier in hand to summon the Abbot; then marching before the parson with bell, book, and candle; again crowned with ivy, when he seizes the Duke, claims his partners, beginning with the Pope, going down impartially through Emperor of Francis I., nobleman, advocate, physician, ploughman, countess, old woman, little child, etc., etc., and leading each unwilling or willing victim in turn to the terrible dance. One woman meets her doom by Death in the character of a robber in a wood. Another, the Duchess, sits up in bed fully dressed, roused from her sleep by two skeletons, one of them playing a fiddle.

Granting the grotesqueness, freedom, variety, and wonderful precision of these woodcuts, I beg my readers to contrast their spirit with that of Albrecht Dürer's 'The Knight, Death, and the Devil,' or Orcagna's 'Triumph of Death.' In Holbein's designs there is no noble consoling faith; there is but a fierce defiance and wild mockery of inevitable fate, such as goes beyond the levity with which the Venetians in the time of the plague retired to their country-houses and danced, sung, and told tales, till the pestilence was upon them. It has a closer resemblance to the piteous madness with which the condemned prisoners during the French Reign of Terror rehearsed the falling of the guillotine, or the terrible pageant with which the same French, as represented by their Parisian brethren, professed to hail the arrival of the cholera.

Of the 'More Family' there are so many duplicates or versions, that, as in the case of Erasmus's picture, it is hard to say which is the original picture, or whether Holbein did more than sketch the original, or merely sketch the various heads to be afterwards put together by an inferior artist. A singular distribution of the light in the best authenticated picture has been supposed to favour this conjecture. But under any supposition, this, the second of the three noted English family pictures, is of the greatest interest. I shall record a minute and curious description given of this 'More Family,' which is still in the possession of a descendant of the Mores and Ropers.

'The room which is here represented seemed to be a large dining-room. At the upper end of it stands a chamber-organ on a cupboard, with a curtain drawn before it. On each end of the cupboard, which is covered with a carpet of tapestry, stands a flower-pot of flowers, and on the cupboard are laid a lute, a base-viol, a pint pot or ewer covered in part with a cloth folded several times, and _Boetius de Consolatione Philosophiæ_, with two other books upon it. By this cupboard stands a daughter of Sir Thomas More's, putting on her right-hand glove, and having under her arm a book bound in red Turkey leather and gilt, with this inscription round the outside of the cover--_Epistolica Senecæ_. Over her head is written in Latin, _Elizabeth Dancy_, daughter of Sir Thomas More, aged 21.

'Behind her stands a woman holding a book open with both her hands, over whose head is written _Spouse of John Clements_.[38]

'Next to Mrs Dancy is Sir John More in his robes as one of the justices of the King's Bench, and by him Sir Thomas in his chancellor's robes, and collar of SS, with a rose pendant before. They are both sitting on a sort of tressel or armed bench, one of the arms and legs and one of the tassels of the cushion appear on the left side of Sir Thomas. At the feet of Sir John lies a cur-dog, and at Sir Thomas's a Bologna shock. Over Sir John's head is written, _John More, father, aged_ 76. Over Sir Thomas's, _Thomas More, aged_ 50. Between them, behind, stands the wife of John More, Sir Thomas's son, over whose head is written _Anne Cresacre, wife of John More, aged_ 15. Behind Sir Thomas, on his left hand stands his only son, John More, pictured with a very foolish aspect, and looking earnestly in a book which he holds open with both his hands. Over his head is written, _John, son of Thomas More, aged_ 19.' (The only and witless son of the family, on whom Sir Thomas made the comment to his wife:--'You long wished for a boy, and you have got one--for all his life.')

'A little to the left of Sir Thomas are sitting on low stools his two daughters, Cecilia and Margaret. Next him is Cecilia, who has a boot in her lap, clasped. By her side sits her sister Margaret, who has likewise a book on her lap, but wide open, in which is written, _L. An. Senecæ--Oedipus--Fata si liceat mihi fingere arbitrio meo, temperem zephyro levi_. On Cecilia's petticoat is written, _Cecilia Heron, daughter of Thomas More, aged_ 20, and on Margaret's, _Margaret Roper_, _daughter of Thomas More, aged_ 22.' (The best beloved, most amiable, and most learned of Sir Thomas's daughters, who visited him in the Tower and encouraged him to remain true to his convictions, while her step-mother urged him to abjure his faith. Margaret Roper intercepted her father on his return to the Tower after his trial, and penetrating the circle of the Guards, hung on his neck and bade him farewell. There is a tradition that she caused her father's head to be stolen from the spike of the bridge on which it was exposed, and, getting it preserved, kept it in a casket. She and her husband, William Roper, wrote together the biography of her father, Sir Thomas More.)

'Just by Mrs Roper sits Sir Thomas's lady in an elbow-chair (?), holding a book open in her hands. About her neck she has a gold chain, with a cross hanging to it before. On her left hand is a monkey chained, and holding part of it with one paw and part of it with the other. Over her head is written '_spouse of Thomas More, aged_ 57.'

(Dame Alice More, the second wife of Sir Thomas More, a foolish and mean-spirited woman.)

'Behind her is a large arched window, in which is placed a flower-pot (a vase) of flowers, and a couple of oranges. Behind the two ladies stands Sir Thomas's fool, who, it seems, was bereft of his judgment by distraction. He has his cap on, and in it are stuck a red and white rose, and on the brim of it is a shield with a red cross on it, and a sort of seal pendant. About his neck he wears a black string with a cross hanging before him, and his left thumb is stuck in a broad leathern girdle clasp'd about him. Over his head is written _Henry Pattison, servant_ of Thomas More. At the entrance of the room where Sir Thomas and his family are, stands a man in the portal who has in his left hand a roll of papers or parchments with two seals appendant, as if he was some way belonging to Sir Thomas as Lord Chancellor. Over his head is written _Joannes Heresius, Thomae Mori famulus_. In another room at some distance is seen through the door-case a man standing at a large sleeved gown of a sea-green colour, and under it a garment of a blossom-colour, holding a book open in his hands written or printed in the black letter, and reading very earnestly in it. About the middle of the room, over against Sir Thomas, hangs a clock with strings and leaden weights without any case.'[39]

It is notable that not one of Sir Thomas's sons-in-law is in this picture, neither is there a grandchild, though one or more is known to have been born at the date.

The miniature of Anne of Cleves, if it ever existed, is lost; it is probable that what was really referred to was the portrait of Anne by Holbein in the Louvre, where she appears 'as a kindly and comely woman in spite of her broad nose and swarthy complexion, but by no means such a painted Venus as might have deceived King Hal.'[40]

A well-known portrait by Holbein is that of a 'Cornish Gentleman,' with reddish hair and beard. I saw this portrait not long ago, as it was exhibited among the works of the Old Masters, and so much did it look as though the figure would step from the frame, that it was hard to believe that more than three hundred years had passed since the original walked the earth.[41]

Doubtless the last of Holbein's portrait pieces, which it is reported he left uncompleted when he died, is that of the 'Barber Surgeons,' painted on the occasion of the united company receiving their charter from the king, and including the king's portrait. This picture still hangs in the old company's hall.

I have only to say a few more words of those sketches which survive the destruction of the picture--Holbein's allegory of the 'Triumph of Riches,' and the 'Triumph of Poverty,' and of his portrait sketches. In the 'Triumph of Riches,' Plutus, an old man bent double, drives in a car, drawn by four white horses; before him, Fortune, blind, scatters money. The car is followed by Croesus, Midas, and other noted misers and spendthrifts--for Cleopatra, the only woman present, is included in the group. In the 'Triumph of Poverty,' Poverty is an old woman in squalor and rags, who is seated in a shattered vehicle, drawn by asses and oxen, and guided by Hope and Diligence. The designs are large and bold. In the first, a resemblance to Henry VIII, is found in Croesus. If the resemblance were intentional on Holbein's part, it showed the same want of tact and feeling which the painter early betrayed in his caricature of Erasmus.

But the best of Holbein's drawings are his portrait sketches with chalks, on flesh-tinted paper. These sketches have a history of their own, subsequent to their execution by Holbein. After being in the possession of the art-loving Earl of Arundel, and carried to France, they were lost sight of altogether for the space of a century, until they were discovered by Queen Caroline, wife of George II., in a bureau at Kensington. You will hear a little later that the finest collection of miniatures in England went through the same process of disappearance and recovery.[42] These original sketches, in addition to their great artistic merit, form a wonderful collection of speaking likenesses, belonging to the court of Henry VIII.,--likenesses which had been happily identified in time by Sir John Cheke (in the reign of Elizabeth), since the names of the originals have been inscribed on the back of each drawing, as it is believed, by Sir John Cheke's hand. The collection is now in the Queen's library, Windsor, with photographs at Kensington Museum. There are one or two of Holbein's reputed portraits at Hampton Court.

I must pass over some painters as not being sufficiently represented for my purpose. Among these is Sir Antony More, Philip II, of Spain's friend. It is recorded that Philip having rested his hand on the shoulder of More while at work, the bold painter turned round, and daubed the royal hand with vermilion. This gave rise to the courtier-saying that Philip 'made slaves of his friends, and friends of his painters.' Another is Zucchero, one of the painters who was requested by Queen Elizabeth to paint her picture without shade, the result being 'a woman with a Roman nose, a huge ruff and farthingale, and a bushel of pearls.' There are also Van Somer,--Janssens, who painted Lady Bowyer, named for her exquisite beauty, 'The star of the East,' and Susanna Lister, the most beautiful woman at court, when presented in marriage to Sir Geoffrey Thornhurst by James I, in person,[43]--and Daniel Myttens, all foreigners, Flemish or Dutch, whom we must thus briefly dismiss. And now we come to Van Dyck.

Antony Van Dyck was born at Antwerp, in 1599. His father was a merchant; his mother was famous for painting flowers in small, and for needlework in silk. The fashion of painting 'in small' had prevailed for some time. Horace Walpole mentions that the mother of Lucas de Heere, a Flemish painter, born in 1534, could paint with such 'diminutive neatness' that she had executed 'a landscape with a windmill, miller, a cart and horse, and passengers,' which half a grain of corn could cover. At ten years of age, Van Dyck began to study as a painter, and he soon became a pupil, and afterwards a favourite pupil, of Rubens. In 1618, when Van Dyck was but a lad of seventeen years, he was admitted as a master into the painters' guild of St Luke. Two years later, he was still working with Rubens, who, seeing his lameness of invention, counselled him to abide by portrait painting, and to visit Italy. A year later, in 1621, when Van Dyck was twenty years of age, he came to London, already becoming a resort of Flemish painters, and lodging with a countryman of his own, worked for a short time in the service of James I.

On Van Dyck's return to Flanders, and on the death of his father, he was able to take Rubens' advice, and in 1623, when Van Dyck was still only twenty-two years of age, he set out for Venice, the Rome of the Flemish painters. Before quitting Antwerp, Van Dyck, in proof of the friendship which existed between the painters, presented Rubens with several of the former's pictures, among them his famous portrait of 'Rubens' wife.' As a pendant to this generosity, when Van Dyck came back to Antwerp, and complained to Rubens that he--Van Dyck--could not live on the profits of his painting, Rubens went next day and bought every picture of Van Dyck's which was for sale.

Van Dyck spent five years in Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome, and Palermo, but residing principally at Genoa. In Italy, he began to indulge in his love of splendid extravagance, and in the fastidious fickleness which belonged to the evil side of his character. At Rome he was called 'the cavalier painter,' yet his first complaint on his return to Antwerp was, that he could not live on the profits of his painting! He avoided the society of his homelier countrymen.

At Palermo, Van Dyck knew, and according to some accounts, painted the portrait of Sophonisba Anguisciola, who claimed to be the most eminent portrait painter among women. She was then about ninety years of age, and blind, but she still delighted in having in her house a kind of academy of painting, to which all the painters visiting Palermo resorted. Van Dyck asserted that he owed more to her conversation than to the teaching of all the schools. A book of his sketches, which was recovered, showed many drawings 'after Sophonisba Anguisciola.' She is said to have been born at Cremona, was invited at the age of twenty-six by Philip II, to Spain, and was presented by him with a Spanish don for a husband, and a pension of a thousand crowns a-year from the customs of Palermo.

The plague drove Van Dyck from Italy back to Flanders, where he painted for a time, and presented his picture of the 'Crucifixion' to the Dominicans as a memorial gift in honour of his father, but in Flanders Rubens' fame overshadowed that of every other painter, and Van Dyck, recalling an invitation which he had received from the Countess of Arundel while still in Italy, came a second time to England, in 1630, when he was about thirty years of age, and lodged again with a fellow-countryman and painter named Gildorp. But his sensitive vanity was wounded by his not at once receiving an introduction to the king, or the countenance which the painter considered his due, and the restlessness, which was a prominent feature in his character, being re-awakened, he withdrew once more from England, and returned to the Low Countries in 1631. At last, a year later, in 1632, Van Dyck's pride was propitiated by receiving a formal invitation from Charles I., through Sir Kenelm Digby, to visit England, and this time the painter had no cause to complain of an unworthy reception. He was lodged by the king among his artists at Blackfriars, having no intercourse with the city, save by water. He had the king, with his wife and children, to sit to him, and was granted a pension of two hundred a-year, with the distinction of being named painter to his Majesty.

A year later Van Dyck was knighted. Royal and noble commissions flowed upon him, and the king, who had a hereditary love of art, visited the painter continually, and spent some of the happiest and most innocent hours of his brief and clouded life in Van Dyck's company. Thus began Van Dyck's success in England.

To give you an example of how often, and in how many different manners, Van Dyck painted the king and royal family, I shall quote from a list of his pictures--

'King Charles in coronation robes.'

'King Charles in armour' (twice).

'King Charles in white satin, with his hat on, just descended from his horse; in the distance, view of the Isle of Wight.'

'King Charles in armour, on a white horse; Monsieur de St Antoine, his equerry, holding the king's helmet.'

'The King and Queen sitting; Prince Charles, very young, standing at the King's side; the Duke of York, an infant, on the Queen's knee.'

'The King and Queen holding a crown of laurel between them.'

'The Queen in white.'

'Prince Charles in armour' (two or three times).

'King, Queen, Prince Charles, and Princess Mary.'

'Queen with her five children.'

'Queen with dwarfs,[44] Sir Geoffrey Hudson having a monkey on his shoulder.'

Van Dyck had several great patrons, after the king. For the Earl of Arundel, in addition to portraits of the Earl and Countess, the painter designed a second Arundel family picture, which was painted by Fruitiers. For George, Duke of Buckingham, Van Dyck painted one of his finest double portraits of the Duke's two sons, when children. For the Northumberland family Van Dyck painted, besides portraits of Henry and Algernon, Earls of Northumberland, another famous picture, that of the two beautiful sisters, Lady Dorothy Percy, afterwards Countess of Leicester, and her sister, Lady Lucy Percy, afterwards Countess of Carlisle, whose charms figure frequently in the memoirs of her time. William and Philip, Earls of Pembroke, were also among his patrons, and for the second he painted his great family picture, 'The Wilton Family.' Sir Kenelm Digby, too, whose wife Venitia was more frequently painted than any woman of her day, and was not more distinguished for her beauty than for her lack of nobler qualities. Van Dyck alone painted her several times, the last after her sudden death, for her vain and eccentric, if gallant, husband, who in the end was no friend to Van Dyck.

But these high names by no means exhaust the list of patrons of a painter who, among various contradictory qualities, was indefatigably industrious. His work is widely distributed among the Scotch as well as the English descendants of the nobility whom he painted, so that the possession of at least one ancestral 'Van Dyck' accompanies very many patents of nobility, and is equivalent to a warrant of gentle birth.

The Earl of Clarendon, in the next reign, had a great partiality for Van Dyck's pictures, and was said to be courted by gifts of them until his apartments at Cornbury were furnished with full-length 'Van Dycks.' A third of his collection went to Kitty Hyde, Duchess of Queensberry, one of the Earl's three co-heiresses. Through the Rich family many of these 'Van Dycks' passed to Taymouth Castle, where by a coincidence they were lodged in the company of numerous works of George Jamieson of Aberdeen, who is said to have been for a short time a fellow-pupil of Van Dyck's under Rubens, who has been called 'the Scotch Van Dyck,' and who is certainly the first native painter who deserves honourable mention. Since the death of the last Marquis of Breadalbane these travelled 'Van Dycks' have gone back to the English representative of the Rich family.

Van Dyck had forty pounds for a half, and sixty pounds for a whole-length picture;--for a large piece of the King, Queen, and their children, he had a hundred pounds. For the Wilton family picture he had five hundred and twenty-five pounds. But Van Dyck soon impaired his fortune. He was not content with having a country-house at Eltham in Kent, where he spent a portion of each summer; he would emulate in his expenditure the most spendthrift noble of that reign. 'He always went magnific so good a table in his apartment that few princes were more visited and better served.' His marriage was not calculated to teach him moderation. In his thirty-ninth year the King gave him the hand of Marie Ruthven, who was nearly related to the unhappy Earl of Gowrie. She was his niece, her father having been the scarcely less unhappy younger brother Patrick, a physician, who, apprehended when a young man on the charge of being concerned in the treason of his elder brothers, spent his manhood in the Tower. He was kept a prisoner there from 1584 to 1619, nearly forty years, and was only released in his age and infirmity when his mind was giving way. Patrick Ruthven's infant daughter had been adopted, either through charity or perversity, by Anne of Denmark, and brought up first at the court of Anne, and afterwards at that of Henrietta Maria. The assertion that Marie Ruthven was a very beautiful woman has been contradicted. It was said that 'she was bestowed in marriage on Sir Antony Van Dyck as much to humble further the already humbled and still detested family of Ruthven, as to honour the painter; but this does not seem consistent with King Charles's known favour for Van Dyck. Yet such a view might have been entertained by Marie Ruthven herself, who, according to tradition, held herself degraded by the marriage, and never forgave the degradation. She was not a loving wife to a man who could hardly have been a very loving or loyal husband. And certainly the marriage did not unite the painter closer to the king.

With his professional industry, Van Dyck combined an equally unquenchable love of pleasure, which, with his luxurious and sedentary habits, induced paroxysms of gout, from which Rubens also suffered severely. This must have ultimately disqualified him for good work, and when his debts accumulated in greater proportion even than his receipts, in place of having recourse, like Rubens, to his painting-room, Van Dyck tried a shorter road to get rich, by following the idle example of Sir Kenelm Digby in his pursuit of alchemy and the philosopher's stone.

In the year of his marriage, Van Dyck re-visited Flanders, in company with his wife, and then repaired to France, it is understood with the intention of settling there. He was instigated to the step by his wife, and his own ambition of rivalling Rubens' triumphs at the Luxembourg; but the preference which the French gave to the works of their countryman, Nicolas Poussin, roused his latent jealousy, and so mortified him as to induce him to renounce his intention. He determined to return to England, and was, to his credit, confirmed in his resolution by the threatening civil war which was to shake his royal master's throne to the foundation, rather than deterred from it.

Again in England, Van Dyck employed Sir Kenelm Digby to make an offer on the painter's part that for eight hundred pounds he would paint the history, and a procession of the Knights of the Garter on the walls of the Knights' banqueting-room at Whitehall--that palace which was to have surpassed the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the Escurial, and from one of the windows of which Charles stepped out on his scaffold. But the proposal was rejected, and immediately afterwards the civil war broke out, and was speedily followed by the death of Van Dyck, about a year after his marriage, when he was a little over forty years old, at Blackfriars, in 1641. He was buried in old St Paul's, near the tomb of John of Gaunt. His daughter, Justiniana, was born a short time--some say only eight days--before her father died, and was baptized on the day of his death. Van Dyck left effects and sums due to him to the amount of twenty thousand pounds; but the greater part of the debts were found beyond recovery at the close of the civil war. His daughter grew up, and married a Mr Stepney, 'who rode in King Charles's life guards.' His widow re-married; her second husband was a Welsh knight.

Van Dyck's contradictory elements. He was actuated by opposite motives which are hard to analyze, and which in their instability have within themselves, whatever their outward advantages, the doom of failure in the highest excellence. He was a proud man, dissatisfied both with himself and his calling, resenting, with less reason than Hans Holbein showed, that he should be condemned to portrait painting, yet by no means undervaluing or slurring over his work. He 'would detain the persons who sat to him to dinner for an opportunity of studying their countenances and re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter, sitting to him seven entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not once let the man see the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck appears to have been a man with the possibilities in him of greater things than he attained, possibilities which were baffled by his weakness and self-indulgence, leaving him with such a sense of this as spoiled his greatest successes.

I have the varying indications of two pictures of Van Dyck from which to get an impression of his personal appearance. The first picture is that of a youthful face, soft, smiling, with dark eyes, finely-formed nose, a slightly open mouth, having a full-cleft under lip, the hair profuse and slightly curled, but short, and no beard or moustache. The dress is an open doublet, without a collar, a lace cravat, and one arm half bare. The second is the picture of Van Dyck in the Louvre, which is judged the best likeness of the painter. In this his person is slender, his complexion fair, his eyes grey, his hair chestnut brown, his beard and whiskers red. He wears a vest of green velvet, with a plain collar.

In his art, Van Dyck, with something of the glow of Rubens, and with a delicacy peculiarly his own, was decidedly inferior to his great master, both in power and in fertility of genius. In the superficial refinement which was so essential a part of Van Dyck, he had the capacity of conferring on his sitters a reflection of his own outward stateliness and grace. When he painted at his best his portraits were solid, true, and masterly, but he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I., whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who have maintained that Charles,--the son of a plain uncouth father, and of a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in his childhood a sickly rickety child,--was by no means so well endowed in the matter of manly beauty as we have supposed. These students of old gossip and close investigation, have alleged that Charles was long and lanky, after he had ceased to be Baby Charles; that his nose was too large, and, alas! apt to redden; that his eyes were vacillating; and his mouth, the loosely hung mouth of a man who begins by being irresolute, and ends by being obstinate.[45] Again, in the hands of a sitter, which Van Dyck was supposed to paint with special care and elegance, it has been argued that he copied always the same hand, probably his own, in ignorance, or in defiance of the fact that hands have nearly as much and as varying character as a painter can discover in faces. Though Van Dyck painted many beautiful women, he did not excel in rendering them beautiful on canvas, so that succeeding generations, in gazing on Van Dyck's versions of Venitia, Lady Digby, and Dorothy Sydney--Waller's Sacharissa,--have wondered how Sir Kenelm, Waller, and their contemporaries, could find these ladies so beautiful.

Van Dyck certainly owed something of the charm of his pictures to the dress of the period, with regard to which he received this credit that 'Van Dyck was the first painter who e'er put ladies' dress into a careless romance.' But in reality never was costume better suited for a painter like Van Dyck.

The hair in the men was allowed to flow to the shoulders or gathered in a love knot, while the whiskers and beard formed a point. In the women the hair was crisped in curls round the face. The ruff in men and women had yielded to the broad, rich, falling collar, with deep scallops of point lace. Vest and cloak were of the richest velvet or satin, or else, on the breaking out of the civil war, men appeared in armour. The man's hat was broad and flapping, usually turned up at one side, and having an ostrich feather in the band; his long wide boots were of Spanish leather, and he wore gauntlet gloves, and rich ruffles at his wrists. The women wore hoods and mantles, short bodices, ample trains, and wide sleeves terminating in loose ruffles at the elbow, which left half of the arm bare. Pearl necklaces and bracelets, round feather fans, and 'knots of flowers,' were the almost universal ornaments of women. Another ornament of both men and women, which belonged to the day, and was very common in the quarters I have been referring to, was a miniature enclosed in a small case of ivory or ebony, carved like a rose, and worn on the left side in token of betrothal.[46] Van Dyck, along with the appreciation of black draperies which he held in common with Rubens, was specially fond of painting white or blue satin. He is said to have used a brown preparation of pounded peach-stones for glazing the hair in his pictures.

In the end, with all the aids that critics may have given him, and all the faults they may find in him, Van Dyck was a great, and in the main an earnest portrait painter. Perhaps 'Charles in white satin, just descended from his horse,' is the best of the single portraits which were held to be Van Dyck's forte.

I must try to give my readers some idea of Van Dyck's 'Wilton Family.' It has been so praised, that some have said 'it might have been covered with gold as a price to obtain it;' on the other hand, it has not escaped censure. One critic asserts that there is no common action uniting the figures, and that the faces are so different in complexion--one yellow-faced boy appearing either jaundiced or burnt by a tropical sun, that the family might have lived in different climates.

This is the story of the picture. 'Earl Philip of Pembroke having caused his family to meet, informs them with great emotion of the necessity of his eldest son Charles, Lord Herbert, going into the army of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, there to acquire military honour and experience, notwithstanding his having just married Mary, daughter of George, Duke of Buckingham. Lord Herbert is receiving the news with ardour, the young bride is turning aside her fair face to hide her tears. (Charles Lord Herbert was married Christmas, 1634, went to Florence, and died there of small pox, January, 1636.)

'In the Pembroke picture (or "Wilton Family") there are ten figures. The Earl and Countess are seated on a dais, under a coat of arms. He wears a great lace collar, an order on his breast, a key at his girdle, and has great shoes with roses. She has flowing curls, hanging sleeves, arms crossed, necklace on the bare neck. (The Countess of Pembroke was the Earl's second wife, Anne Clifford, daughter of George, Earl of Cumberland, the brave lady who defied Cromwell, and was fond of signing her name with the long string of titles derived from her two husbands, "Anne Dorset, Pembroke, Montgomery.") Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon, is introduced with his wife, Lady Anne Sophia Herbert, daughter of Earl Philip; they are on the Countess's left hand. The daughter-in-law, about to be parted from her husband, stands on the lowest step of the dais; she is elegantly dressed, with hanging sleeves knotted with bows from shoulder to elbow. Two young men, the bridegroom and his brother, are at their father's right hand; they wear great falling collars and cloaks. There are three half-grown boys in tunics without collars, and great roses in their shoes, with a dare three daughters of the family who died in infancy.'

Van Dyck's finest sacred pictures were his early 'Crucifixion,' and a Pieta, at Antwerp. In these he gave a promise of nobler and deeper pathos than he afterwards fulfilled. His pictures are to be found freely, as I have written, in old English mansions, such as Arundel and Alnwick Castles, Knowsley, Knole, Petworth, etc. A head said to be by Van Dyck is in the National Gallery.

Van Dyck had few pupils: one, an Englishman named Dobson, earned an honourable reputation as a painter.

From Sir Antony More's time down to that of Leíly and Kneller, the rage for portraits was continually increasing, and took largely the form of miniatures, which were painted chiefly by foreigners; notably by Hilliard and two Olivers or Oliviers, a father and son of French extraction, and by a Swiss named Petitot. A collection of miniatures by the Oliviers, including no less than six of Venitia, Lady Digby, had a similar fate to that of Holbein's drawings. The miniatures had been packed in a wainscot box and conveyed to the country-house in Wales of Mr Watkin Williams, who was a descendant of the Digby family. In course of time the box with its contents, doubtless forgotten, had been transferred to a garret, where it had lain undiscovered for, it has been supposed, fully a hundred years. It was two hundred years after the date of the painting of the miniatures, that on some turning over of the lumber in the garret, the exquisite miniatures, fresh as on the day when they were painted, were accidentally brought to light.[47]

Sir Peter Lely was born in Westphalia in 1618. His real name was Vander Facs, and his father was a 'Captain of Foot,' who, having chanced to be born in rooms over a perfumer's shop which bore the sign of a lily, took fantastically enough the name of Du Lys, or Lely, which he transmitted to his son. Sir Peter Lely, after studying in a studio at Haarlem, came to England when he was twenty-three years of age, in 1641, and set himself to copy the pictures of Van Dyck, who died in the year of Lely's arrival in England, and whom he succeeded as court painter. Lely was knighted by Charles II., married an English woman, and had a son and a daughter, who died young. He made a large fortune, dying at last of apoplexy, with which he was seized as he was painting the Duchess of Somerset, when he was sixty-two years of age, in 1680.

With regard to Lely's character, we may safely judge from his works that he was such a man as Samuel Pepys, 'of easy virtue,' a man holding a low enough standard by which to measure himself and others. Mr Palgrave quotes from Mr Leslie the following characteristic anecdote of Lely, which seems to prove that he was aware of, and coolly accepted, the decline of art in his generation and person. A nobleman said to Lely, 'How is it that you have so great a reputation, when you know, as well as I do, that you are no painter?' 'True, but I am the best you have,' was the answer. Lely's punishment followed him into his art, for beginning by copying Van Dyck, it is said of Lely that he degenerated in his work till it bore the very 'stamp of the depravity of the age.'

Lely's sitters were mostly women. Among them was one who deserved a fitter painter, Mistress Anne Killigrew, Dryden's--

'Youngest virgin daughter of the skies.'

In Lely's portrait of her, she is a neat, slightly prim, delicate beauty, with very fine features, and such sleepy eyes, as were probably the gift of Lely, since he has bestowed them generally on the women whom he painted. Mistress Anne Killigrew's hair is in curls, piled up in front, but hanging down loosely behind. Her bodice is gathered together by a brooch, and she has another brooch on one shoulder. She wears a light pearl necklace, and 'drops' shaped like shamrocks in her ears.

Lely painted both Charles I, and Cromwell, who desired his painters to omit 'no pimple or wart,' but to paint his face as they saw it.

Among less notable personages Lely painted Monk, Duke of Albemarle, and his rough Duchess, once a camp follower, according to popular rumour, and named familiarly by the contemptuous wits of the day 'Nan Clarges.' It is with not more honourable originals than poor 'Nan Clarges' that Lely's name as a painter is chiefly associated. We know what an evil time the years after the Restoration proved in England, and it was to immortalize, as far as he could, the vain, light women of the generation that Lely lent what skill he possessed. There their pictures hang in what has been called 'the Beauty Room' at Hampton Court, and no good man or woman can look at them without holding such beauty detestable.

At Hampton Court also there are several of the eleven portraits of Admirals whom Lely painted for James II, when Duke of York.

Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, incorrectly Canaletti, was born at Venice in 1697. He was the son of a scene painter at the theatre. In his youth he worked under his father; a little later he went to Rome, and studied for some time there. Then he came to England, where he remained only for two years. I have hesitated about placing his name among those of the foreign painters resident in England, but so many of his works are in this country that he seems to belong to it in an additional sense. He is said to have 'made many pictures and much money.' He died at Venice when he was seventy years of age, in 1768. As a painter he was famous for his correctness of perspective and precision of outline (in which it is alleged he aided himself by the use of the camera), qualities specially valuable in the architectural subjects of which he was fond, drawing them principally from his native Venice. But his very excellence was mechanical, and he showed so little originality or, for that matter, fidelity of genius, that he painted his landscapes in invariable sunshine.

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The great wood-carver Grinling Gibbons deserves mention among the artists of this date. He was a native of Rotterdam, where he was born in 1648. He came to London with other carvers the year after the great fire of London, and was introduced by Evelyn to Charles II., who took him into his employment. 'Gibbons was appointed master carver in wood to George I., with a salary of eighteen-pence a day.' He died at his house in Bow Street in the sixty-third year of his age, in 1721. It is said that no man before Gibbons 'gave to wood the lightness of flowers.' For the great houses of Burghley, Petworth, and Chatsworth, Gibbons carved exquisite work, in festoons for screens, and chimney-pieces, and panels for pictures, of fruit, flowers, shells, and birds.

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Sir Godfrey Kneller was born at Lübeck in 1646, and was the son of an architect. He is said to have studied under Rembrandt; but if this be true, it must have been in Kneller's early youth. It is more certain that he travelled in Italy and returned to settle in Hamburg, but changing his plans, he came to England, when he was about thirty years of age, in 1675. London became his home. There he painted portraits with great success; his prices being fifteen guineas for a head, twenty if with one hand, thirty for a half, and sixty for a whole-length portrait. Charles II, sat at the same time to Kneller and to Lely. Not Titian himself painted more crowned heads than it fell to the lot of Kneller to paint--not less than six reigning kings and queens of England, and, in addition, Louis XIV. of France, Charles VI, of Spain, and the Czar Peter of Russia.

William III, created Kneller a knight, and George I, raised the painter's rank to that of a baronet. Sir Godfrey was notorious for his conceit, irritability, and eccentricity, and for the wit which sparkled more in his conversation than in any originality of observation displayed in his painting. Walpole attributes to Kneller the opposite qualities of great negligence and great love of money. The negligence or slovenliness, whether in the man or the artist, did not interfere with an immense capacity for work, such as it was, but if Horace Walpole be right, that Kneller employed many Flemish painters under him to undertake the wigs, draperies, etc. etc., the amount of work in portrait painting which Sir Godfrey Kneller accomplished is so far explained. He attained the end of being a very rich man, and married an English woman, but left no family to succeed to his wealth and his country-seat of Whitton, when he died at his house in London in his seventy-eighth year, in 1723.

As a painter Sir Godfrey Kneller showed considerable talent in drawing, and a certain cumbrous dignity of design, but he had much more industry of a certain kind than artistic feeling or taste. When he and Lely painted Charles II, together, Kneller's application and rapidity of execution were so far before those of Lely, who was technically the better painter of the two, that Kneller's picture was finished when Lely's was dead-coloured only. Kneller was highly praised by Dryden, Addison, Prior, and Steele. Apropos of these writers, among the most famous works of Kneller are the forty-three portraits, painted originally for Tonson, the bookseller, of the members of the Kit Cat club, the social and literary club of the day, which got its name from the chance of its holding its meetings in a house the owner of which bore the unique name of Christopher Cat. Another series of portraits by Kneller are what ought to be, in their designation, the Hampton Court Beauties. These are still, like the other 'Beauties,' at Hampton. The second series was proposed by William's Queen Mary, and included herself, Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, and Mary Bentinck. To Sarah Jennings men did award the palm of beauty, but poor Queen Mary, who had a modest, simple, comely, English face as a princess, had lost her fresh youthful charm by the time she became Queen of England, and was still further disfigured by the swelling of the face to which she was liable. Her proposal to substitute the worthier women of her court for the unworthy beauties of her uncle King Charles' court was not relished, and helped to render Mary unpopular--among the women, at least, of her nobility. Neither was Sir Godfrey Kneller qualified to enhance the attractions of Mary's maids of honour and ladies in waiting, who, to complete their disadvantages, lived at a period when it had become the fashion for women to crown their persons by an erection on their natural heads of artificial 'edifices of three heads.'

To Kneller, as I have already written, we owe the preservation of Raphael's cartoons.