The Purpose Of The Musical Chimes To
Which I Had So Artlessly Listened Was To Usher In This
Fruitless Interval.
The regulation was absolute, and
my disappointment relative, as I have been happy to
reflect since I "looked up" the picture.
Crowe and
Cavalcaselle assign it without hesitation to Roger van
der Weyden, and give a weak little drawing of it in
their "Flemish Painters." I learn from them also -
what I was ignorant of - that Nicholas Ronin, Chan-
cellor of Burgundy and founder of the establishment
at Beaune, was the original of the worthy kneeling
before the Virgin, in the magnificent John van Eyck
of the Salon Carre. All I could see was the court of
the hospital and two or three rooms. The court, with
its tall roofs, its pointed gables and spires, its wooden
galleries, its ancient well, with an elaborate superstruc-
ture of wrought iron, is one of those places into which
a sketcher ought to be let loose. It looked Flemish
or English rather than French, and a splendid tidiness
pervaded it. The porter took me into two rooms on
the ground-floor, into which the sketcher should also
be allowed to penetrate; for they made irresistible
pictures. One of them, of great proportions, painted
in elaborate "subjects," like a ball-room of the seven-
teenth century, was filled with the beds of patients,
all draped in curtains of dark red cloth, the tradi-
tional uniform of these, eleemosynary couches. Among
them the sisters moved about, in their robes of white
flannel, with big white linen hoods.
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