Paula, And Tobit And The Angel,
Are In His Best And Richest Manner.
It is inconceivable to us, who
graduate men by a high-school standard, that these refined and most
elegant works could have been produced by a man so imperfectly educated
as Claude Lorrain.
There remain the pictures of the Dutch and the Flemings. It is due to
the causes we have mentioned in the beginning that neither in Antwerp
nor Dresden nor Paris is there such wealth and profusion of the
Netherlands art as in this mountain-guarded corner of Western Europe. I
shall have but a word to say of these three vast rooms, for Rubens and
Van Dyck and Teniers are known to every one. The first has here a
representation so complete that if Europe were sunk by a cataclysm from
the Baltic to the Pyrenees every essential characteristic of the great
Fleming could still be studied in this gallery. With the exception of
his Descent from the Cross in the Cathedral at Antwerp, painted in a
moment of full inspiration that never comes twice in a life, everything
he has done elsewhere may be matched in Madrid. His largest picture here
is an Adoration of the Kings, an overpowering exhibition of wasteful
luxuriance of color and fougue of composition. To the left the Virgin
stands leaning with queenly majesty over the effulgent Child. From this
point the light flashes out over the kneeling magi, the gorgeously
robed attendants, the prodigality of velvet and jewels and gold, to fade
into the lovely clear-obscure of a starry night peopled with dim camels
and cattle.
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