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. 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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