[251] "Hung on each side of the great Vandyck, on the east wall of the principal Dutch and Flemish room, they have given the completing touch to that collection of chefs d'œuvre, and made it now beyond question the finest wall of masterpieces of those schools in Europe" (Sir Edward Poynter's speech at the Royal Academy Banquet, 1899).
[252] The purchase for the nation was at one time in jeopardy. Early in 1899 the two pictures were offered by Lord de Saumarez to the National Gallery for the sum of £12,500. A special grant was obtained from Her Majesty's Treasury for this sum on the condition that the Trustees should forego the annual grant for 1899-1900, estimated at £5000. Lord de Saumarez found, however, that he had no power to sell the pictures without an order from the Court of Chancery, and having been subsequently offered the sum of £15,000 for these two pictures, the Court decided they could only be sold to the National Gallery for an advance on the sum offered. The Trustees, therefore, offered the sum of £15,050, for which the Court awarded them to the Trustees. Towards the balance of the purchase money, amounting to £2550, two of the Trustees, Mr. Alfred de Rothschild and Mr. Heseltine, liberally contributed £500 each, and the remainder, amounting to £1550, was paid out of the grant for the year 1898-99.
[253] Mr. Roger Fry (in The Pilot, Jan. 5, 1901) attributes our picture, which he calls "a distressing production," to "some journeyman painter who treated Fra Bartolommeo's design in the spirit of the earlier furniture painters, but without their charm and naïveté."
[254] "His early pictures have only a hint of personal expression. Some of his Madonnas are still almost Byzantine in their hieratic solemnity. It is possible to follow Giovanni Bellini's career almost from year to year by the increase of personal expression in his figures and landscapes" (Mary Logan: Guide to the Italian Pictures at Hampton Court, p. 9).
[255] See Bernhard Berenson's Lorenzo Lotto, 1895, pp. 21-120.
[256] See Mr. Herbert Cook's Giorgione, pp. 68-74.
[257] That fine picture came from the Manfrini Palace at Venice; and though by some called a "bad and late copy" (Mündler, Beiträge zu B.'s Cicerone, 1870, p. 61) is by others highly praised. Thus Waagen, in his Treasures of Art in Great Britain (vol. iii. 1854, p. 19), in describing the Cobham Hall pictures, says of the picture now in the National Gallery that it "agrees essentially with the fine portrait in the Manfrini collection at Venice. But the tone of the flesh is heavier here, and the grey colour of the dress unites too much with the grey ground, while in the Manfrini picture, the brown tones of the dress stand out decidedly from it."
[258] See the Second Annual Report of the National Art Collections Fund, 1906, pp. 35, 36. Until the matter was cleared up by the researches of Señor de Beruete, summarised in that Report, it was supposed that our picture was one of five mythologies painted by Velazquez for the Gallery of Mirrors in the Alcazar of Madrid, two of which perished in the great fire of 1734. Knowledge of this fire was doubtless the origin of a suggestion that our picture also had been damaged and repainted. There was correspondence on this subject, and on others connected with the picture, in the Times of November and December 1905 and the early part of 1906.
[259] The intermediate processes by which the price of the picture rose from £30,500 to £45,000 have not been disclosed. Towards the latter sum, the largest contributions were—"An Englishman" £10,000; Lord Michelham, £8000; and Messrs. Agnew, £5250.
[260] See pp. 75-78 of The Barbizon School, by D. C. Thomson, from whose translation I borrow a few sentences.