On The Extreme Right Is A Most Graceful And Gallant Portrait
Of The Artist On Horseback.
We have another fine self-portraiture in the
Garden of Love, - a group of lords and ladies in a delicious pleasance
where the greatest seigneur is Peter Paul Rubens and the finest lady is
Helen Forman.
These true artists had to paint for money so many ignoble
faces that they could not be blamed for taking their revenge in painting
sometimes their own noble heads. Van Dyck never drew a profile so
faultless in manly beauty as his own which we see on the same canvas
with that of his friend the Earl of Bristol. Look at the two faces side
by side, and say whether God or the king can make the better nobleman.
Among those mythological subjects in which Rubens delighted, the best
here are his Perseus and Andromeda, where the young hero comes
gloriously in a brand-new suit of Milanese armor, while the lovely
princess, in a costume that never grows old-fashioned, consisting of
sunshine and golden hair, awaits him and deliverance in beautiful
resignation; a Judgment of Paris, the Three Graces, - both prodigies of
his strawberries-and-cream color; and a curious suckling of Hercules,
which is the prototype or adumbration of the ecstatic vision of St.
Bernard. He has also a copy of Titian's Adam and Eve, in an
out-of-the-way place downstairs, which should be hung beside the
original, to show the difference of handling of the two master
colorists.
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