The rest of this wall is occupied by some tolerable gigantic altar-pieces and other good works of the School of Rubens. Most of them derive their chief interest from their evident inferiority in design and colour to the handicraft of the Master. They are the very same thing—with the genius omitted.
End wall, 314, Rubens: called the *Holy Trinity. The Almighty supports on His knees the figure of the dead Christ. Behind, hovers the Holy Ghost. On either side, boy angels hold the crown of thorns, the three nails, and the other implements of the Passion. This is really a study in the science of foreshortening, and in the painting of the dead nude, largely suggested, I believe, by a still more unpleasing Mantegna in the Brera at Milan.
719. Above. Excellent fishmongery by Snyders.
212. Janssens: The Schelde bringing wealth to Antwerp, in the allegorical taste of the period.
712. Rubens: St. Dominic.
172. Fyt: Excellent dogs and game.
299. Rubens: An **allegorical picture to enforce the efficacy of the prayers of St. Theresa. The foundress of the Scalzi, dressed in the sober robe of her Carmelite Order, is interceding with Christ for the soul of Bernardino de Mendoza, the founder of a Carmelite convent at Valladolid. Below, souls in Purgatory. In the left-hand corner stands Bernardino, whom, at St. Theresa’s prayer, angels are helping to escape from torment. A fine luminous picture of a most unpleasing subject. Painted for the altar of St. Theresa in the church of her own barefooted Carmelites.
405. Van Dyck: Magnificent portrait of Cesare Alessandro Scaglia, in black ecclesiastical robes, with lace cuffs and collar, and the almost womanish delicate hands of a diplomatic, astute, courtier-like ecclesiastic. The thoughtful eyes and resolute face might belong to a Richelieu.
306. Rubens: **The Education of the Virgin, painted for a chapel of St. Anne. A charming domestic picture of a wealthy young lady of Flanders, pretending to be Our Lady, in a beautifully painted white silk gown. Beside her, her mother, a well-preserved St. Anne, of aristocratic matronly dignity. Behind is St. Joachim, and above, two light little baby angels. The feeling of the whole is graceful courtly-domestic.
481, 482. Two scenes from the life of St. Nicholas, by Van Veen, the master of Rubens. R., he throws through a window three purses of gold as dowries for the three starving daughters of a poor nobleman. (This ornate treatment contrasts wonderfully with the simpler early Italian pictures of the same subject.) L., he brings corn for the starving poor of Myra. Both pictures represent the bourgeois saint in his favourite character of the benefactor of the poor. They are here well placed for contrast with