653. HUSBAND AND WIFE.
Unknown (Early Flemish: 15th century).
This picture, formerly ascribed to Roger van der Weyden, and called "The Painter and his Wife," is delightfully typical of the Flemish ideal both in man and woman—"the man shrewd and determined, the woman sweet and motherly." "They are not fine of figure nor graceful of limb, but, with hardly an exception, their faces tell us that they are men of tried capacity and learnt experience. Through the eyes of many of them glances a happy, childlike soul enough, but the mind is almost invariably a slow-moving, solid power ... and such as they, were the artists who painted them; they possessed the same industry, they admired the same qualities. The virtue of honest strength, which made the men of Flanders the merchant princes of Europe, was the virtue whose traces the artists of Flanders loved to observe.... They care little for mystery, little for pity, little for enthusiasm.... They love a man whose visage tells the strength of his character, who has weathered the buffetings of many a storm, and bears on his visage the marks of the struggle" (Conway's Early Flemish Artists, p. 104).