After this all went well and swiftly. Pa.s.sing over many plates, important and unimportant, we come three years later to the _Great Fair of Florence_, p.r.o.nounced by M. Meaume, Callot"s masterpiece. "It is doubtful," says this excellent authority, "if in Callot"s entire work a single other plate can be found worthy to compete with the _Great Fair of Florence_. He has done as well, perhaps, but never better."
At this time his production was, all of it, full of life and spirit, vivacious and fluent, the very joy of workmanship. He frequently began and finished a plate in a day, and his long apprenticeship to his tools had made him completely their master. In many of the prints are found traces of dry point, and those who looked on while he worked have testified that when a blank s.p.a.ce on his plate displeased him he was wont to take up his instrument and engrave a figure, a bit of drapery, or some trees in the empty s.p.a.ces, directly upon the copper, improvising from his ready fancy.
For recreation he commonly turned to some other form of his craft. He tried painting, and some of his admirers would like to prove that he was a genius in this sort, but it is fairly settled that when once he became entangled in the medium of color he was lost, producing the heaviest and most unpleasing effects, and that he produced no finished work in this kind. He contributed to the technical outfit of the etcher a new varnish, the hard varnish of the lute-makers which up to that time had not been used in etching, and which, subst.i.tuted for the soft ground, enabled him to execute his marvelous little figures with great lightness and delicacy, and also made it possible for him to keep several plates going at once, as he delighted to do, turning from one to another as his mood prompted him.
This Florentine period was one of countless satisfactions for him. More fortunate than many artists, he won his fame in time to enjoy it. His productions were so highly regarded during his lifetime that good proofs were eagerly sought, and to use Baldinucci"s expression, were "_enfermees sous sept clefs_." He was known all over Europe, and about his neck he wore a magnificent gold chain given him by the Grand Duke Cosimo II, in token of esteem. In the town which he had entered so few years before in the gipsy caravan, he was now the arbiter of taste in all matters of art, highly honored, and friend of the great. When Cosimo died and the pensions of the artists were discontinued, Callot was quite past the need of princely favors, and could choose his own path. He had already refused offers from Pope and emperor and doubtless would have remained in Florence had not Prince Charles of Lorraine determined to reclaim him for his native place.
In 1621 or 1622 he returned to Nancy, never again to live in Italy. He went back preeminent among his countrymen. He had done in etching what had not been done before him and much that has not been done since. He had created a new genre and a new treatment. He had been faithful to his first lesson from Duccio and had become eloquent in his use of simple outline to express joy, fear, calm or sorrow, his work gaining from this abandonment of shadows a largeness and clearness that separates him from his German contemporaries and adds dignity to the elegance and grace of his figures. His skill with the etching needle had become so great that technical difficulties practically did not exist for him. What he wished to do he did with obvious ease and always with distinction. His feeling for synthesis and balance was as striking as his love of the curious, and as these qualities seldom go together in one mind, the result was an art extremely unlike that of other artists. It was characteristic of him that he could not copy himself, and found himself completely at a loss when he tried to repeat some of his Florentine plates under other skies.
Arrived at Nancy, he found Henry II, the then reigning Duke of Lorraine, ready to accord him a flattering welcome, and under his favor he worked with increasing success. Among the plates produced shortly after his return is one called _Les Supplices_, in which is represented all the punishments inflicted throughout Europe upon criminals and legal offenders. In an immense square the revolting scenes are taking place, and innumerable little figures swarm about the streets and even upon the roofs of the houses. Yet the impression is neither confused nor painful.
A certain impersonality in the rendering, a serious almost melancholy austerity of touch robs the spectacle of its ign.o.ble suggestion.
Inspection of this remarkable plate makes it easy to realize Callot"s supreme fitness for the tasks that shortly were to be laid upon him.
He was chosen by the Infanta Elisabeth-Claire-Eugenie of Austria to commemorate the Siege of Breda, in a series of etchings, and while he was in Brussels gathering his materials for this tremendous work he came to know Van Dyck, who painted his portrait afterward engraved by Vosterman, a superb delineation of both his face and character at this important period of his eminent career. Soon after the etchings were completed, designs were ordered by Charles IV, for the decorations of the great carnival of 1627. Callot was summoned to Paris to execute some plates representing the surrender of La Roch.e.l.le in 1628, and the prior attack upon the fortress of St. Martin on the Isle of Re. In Paris he dwelt with his old friend Israel Henriet, who dealt largely in prints and who had followed with keen attention Callot"s constantly increasing renown. Henriet naturally tried to keep his friend with him in Paris as long as possible, but Callot had lost by this time the vagrant tendencies of his youth. He was married and of a home-keeping disposition, and all that Henriet could throw in his way of stimulating tasks and congenial society, in addition to the formidable orders for which he had contracted, detained him hardly longer than a year. Upon leaving he made over all his Parisian plates save those of the great sieges to Henriet, whose name as publisher appears upon them.
Callot"s return to Nancy marked the close of the second period of his art, the period in which he painted battles with ten thousand episodes revealed in one plate, and so accurately that men of war kept his etchings among their text-books for professional reference. The next demand that was made upon him to represent the downfall of a brave city came from Louis XIII, upon the occasion of his entering Nancy on the 25th of September, 1633. By a ruse Richelieu had made the entry possible, and the inglorious triumph Louis deemed worthy of commemoration by the accomplished engraver now his subject. Neither Callot"s high Lorraine heart nor his brilliant instrument was subjugated, however, and he respectfully begged the monarch to absolve him from a task so revolting to his patriotism. "Sire," he said, "I am of Lorraine, and I cannot believe it my duty to do anything contrary to the honor of my Prince and my Country." The king accepted his remonstrance in good part, declaring that Monsieur of Lorraine was very happy to have subjects so faithful in affection. Certain courtiers took Callot to task, however, for his refusal to obey the will of His Majesty, and to them Callot responded that he would cut off his thumb rather than do violence to his sense of honor. Some of the artist"s historians have made him address this impetuous reply to the king himself, but M. Meaume reminds us that, familiar with courts, he knew too well the civility due to a sovereign to make it probable that he so forgot his dignity. Later the king tried to allure Callot by gifts, honors and pensions, but in vain. The st.u.r.dy gentleman preferred his oppressed prince to the royal favor, and set himself to immortalizing the misfortunes of his country in the superb series of etchings which he called "_Les Miseres de la Guerre_." He made six little plates showing in the life of the soldier the misery he both endures and inflicts upon others. These were the first free inspiration of the incomparable later set called "_Les Grandes Miseres_," "a veritable poem," M. Meaume declares, "a funeral ode describing and deploring the sorrows of Lorraine." These sorrows so much afflicted him that he would gladly have gone back to Italy to spend the last years of his life, had not the condition of his health, brought on by his indefatigable labor, prevented him.
He lived simply in the little town where he had seen his young visions of the spirit of art, walking in the early morning with his elder brother, attending ma.s.s, working until dinner time, visiting in the early afternoon with the persons, many of them distinguished and even of royal blood, who thronged his studio, then working until evening. He rarely attended the court, but grew constantly more quiet in taste and more severe in his artistic method, until the feeling for the grotesque that inspired his earlier years were hardly to be discerned. Once only, in the tremendous plate ill.u.s.trating the Temptation of Saint Anthony, did he return to his old bizarre vision of a world conceived in the mood of Dante and Ariosto.
Callot died on the 24th of March, 1635, at the age of forty-three. Still a young man, he had pa.s.sed through all the phases of temperament that commonly mark the transit from youth to age. And he had used his art in the manner of a master to express the external world and his convictions concerning the great spiritual and ethical questions of his age. He enunciated his message distinctly; there were no tender gradations, no uncertainties of outline or mysteries of surface in his work. It is the grave utterance of the definite French intelligence with a note of deeper suggestion brought from those regions of ironic gloom in which the Florentine recorded his sublime despair.
CARLO CRIVELLI
VI
CARLO CRIVELLI
Among the more interesting pictures acquired by the Metropolitan Museum within the past two years are the panels by Carlo Crivelli, representing respectively St. George and St. Dominic.
Crivelli is one of the fifteenth century Italian masters who show their temperament in their work with extraordinary clearness. His spirit was ardent and his moods were varying. With far less technical skill than his contemporary, Mantegna, he has at once a warmer and more brilliant style and a more modern feeling for natural and significant gesture. His earliest known work that bears a date is the altar-piece in S. Silvestro at Ma.s.sa near Fermo; but his most recent biographer, Mr. Rushworth, gives to his Venetian period before he left for the Marches, the Virgin and Child now at Verona, and sees in this the strongest evidences of his connection with the School of Padua. Other important pictures by him are at Ascoli, in the Lateran Gallery, Rome, in the Vatican, in the Brera Gallery at Milan, in the Berlin Gallery, in the National Gallery at London, in Frankfurt (the Stadel Gallery), in the Museum of Brussels, in Lord Northbrook"s collection, London, in the Boston Museum, in Mrs.
Gardiner"s collection at Boston, and in Mr. Johnson"s collection at Philadelphia. The eight examples in the National Gallery, although belonging for the most part to his later period, show his wide range and his predominating characteristics, which indeed are stamped with such emphasis upon each of his works that despite the many and great differences in these, there seems to be little difficulty in recognizing their authorship. No. 788, _The Madonna and Child Enthroned, surrounded by Saints_, an altarpiece painted for the Dominican Church at Ascoli in 1476, is the most elaborate and pretentious of the National Gallery compositions, but fails as a whole to give that impression of moral and physical energy, of intense feeling expressed with serene art, which renders the _Annunciation_ (No. 739) both impressive and ingratiating.
The lower central compartment is instinct with grace and tenderness. The Virgin, mild-faced and melancholy, is seated on a marble throne. The Child held on her arm, droops his head, heavy with sleep, upon her arm in a babyish and appealing att.i.tude curiously opposed to the dignity of the Child in Mantegna"s group which hangs on the opposite wall. His hand clasps his mother"s finger and his completely relaxed figure has unquestionably been studied from life. At the right and left of the Virgin are St. Peter and St. John, St. Catherine of Alexandria and St.
Dominic, whole-length figures strongly individualized and differentiated. St. John in particular reveals in the beauty of feature and expression Crivelli"s power to portray subtleties and refinements of character without sacrificing his sumptuous taste for accessories and ornament. The Saint, wearing his traditional sheep skin and bearing his cross and scroll, bends his head in meditation. His brows are knit, his features, ascetic in mold and careworn, are eloquent of serious thought and moral conviction. By the side of St. Peter resplendent in pontifical robes and enriched with jewels, he wears the look of a young devout novice not yet so familiar with sanct.i.ty as to carry it with ease. He stands by the side of a little stream, in a landscape that combines in the true Crivelli manner direct realism with decorative formality. The St. Dominic with book and lily in type resembles the figure in the Metropolitan, but the face is painted with greater skill and has more vigor of expression. Above this lower stage of the altarpiece are four half-length figures of St. Francis, St. Andrew the Apostle, St. Stephen and St. Thomas Aquinas, and over these again are four pictures showing the Archangel Michael trampling on the Dragon, St. Lucy the Martyr, St.
Jerome and St. Peter, Martyr, all full length figures of small size and delicately drawn, but which do not belong to the original series. The various parts of the altarpiece were enclosed in a splendid and ornate frame while in the possession of Prince Demidoff in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the whole is a magnificent monument to Crivelli"s art. The heavy gold backgrounds and the free use of gold in the ornaments, together with the use of high relief (St. Peter"s keys are modeled, for example, almost in the round, so nearly are they detached from the panel) represent his tendency to overload his compositions with archaic and realistic detail, but here as elsewhere the effect is one of harmony and corporate unity of many parts. The introduction of sham jewels, such as those set in the Virgin"s crown and in the rings and medallions worn by Peter, fails to destroy the dignity of the execution. It may even be argued that these details enhance it by affording a salient support to the strongly marked emotional faces of the saints and to the vigorous gestures which would be violent in a cla.s.sic setting.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. DOMINIC
_From a panel by Carlo Crivelli_]
A quite different note is struck in the grave little composition belonging to an altarpiece of early date in which two infant angels support the body of Christ on the edge of the tomb. Nothing is permitted to interrupt the simplicity of this pathetic group. In the much more pa.s.sionate rendering of a similar subject--the _Pieta_ in Mr. Johnson"s collection--the child angels are represented in an agony of grief, their features contorted and their gestures despairing. The little angels of the National Gallery picture, on the contrary, are but touched by a pensive sorrow. One of them rests his chin upon the shoulder of the Christ half tenderly, half wearily; the other in fluttering robes of a lovely yellow, applies his slight strength to his task seriously but without emotion. The figure of Christ, tragically quiet, with suffering brows, the wound in the side gaping, is without the suggestion of extreme physical anguish that marks the figure in the Boston _Pieta_. The sentiment with which the panel is inspired is one of gentleness, of resignation, of self-control and piety. The same sentiment is felt in the companion panel, now in the Brussels Gallery--_The Virgin and the Child Jesus_--which originally, with the _Pieta_, formed the central double compartment of a triptych at Monte Fiore, near Fermo. The sad coloring of the Virgin"s robe--a dull bluish green with a gold pattern over an under robe of pale ashes of roses, the calm, benign features, the pa.s.sive hands, are all in the spirit of subdued feeling. The child alone, gnomish in expression and awkward in a straddling att.i.tude upon his mother"s knee, fails to conform to the general gracious scheme.
In the _Annunciation_ already mentioned, we have another phase of Crivelli"s flexible genius--a phase in which are united the pomp and splendor of his fantastic taste with the innocence and sweetness of his most engaging feminine type. It would be difficult to imagine a more demure and girlish Virgin than the small kneeling figure in the richly furnished chamber at the right of the panel. The glory of her fate is symbolized by the broad golden ray falling from the heavens upon her meekly bowed head. Her face is pale with the dim pallor that commonly rests upon Crivelli"s flesh tones, and her clasped hands have the exaggerated length of finger and also the look of extraordinary pliability which he invariably gives. Outside the room in the open court kneels the Angel of the Annunciation and by his side kneels St. Emedius, the patron of Ascoli, with a model of the city in his hands. These figures are realistic in gesture and expression, interested, eager, responsive, filled with quick life and joyous impulse. The richly embroidered garment of the angel, his gilded wings, his traditional att.i.tude, neither overpower nor detract from the vivid individuality of the beautiful face so firmly yet so freely modeled within its delicate hard bounding line. This feeling of actuality in the scene is carried still farther by the introduction of a charming little child on a balcony at the left, peering out from behind a pillar with naive curiosity and half-shy, half-bold determination to see the end of the adventure. All this is conceived in the spirit of modernity and the personal quality is unmistakable and enchanting. There is no excess of emotion nor is there undue restraint. There is a blithe sense of the interest of life and the personality of human beings that gives a value to the subject and a meaning beyond its accepted symbolism. On the technical side, also, the panel has remarkable merit even for this expert and careful painter. His Venetian fondness for magnificent externals finds ample expression in the rich accessories. A peac.o.c.k is perched on the cas.e.m.e.nt of the Virgin"s room, flowers and fruits, vases and variegated marbles all come into the plan of the handsome environment, and are justified artistically by the differentiation of textures, the gradation of color, the research into intricacies of pattern, the light firm treatment of architectural structure, and the skilful subordination of all superficial detail to the elements of the human drama, the figures of which occupy little s.p.a.ce, but are overwhelming in significance.
[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
ST. GEORGE
_From a panel by Carlo Crivelli_]
It is interesting to compare this _Annunciation_ with the two small s.e.xtagonal panels of the same subject in the Stadel Museum at Frankfurt which are earlier in date. In many respects the compositions are closely similar. There is the same red brick wall, the same Oriental rug hanging from the cas.e.m.e.nt, the types of Angel and Virgin are the same, but in the Frankfurt panel there is more impetuous motion in the gesture of the Angel, who hardly pauses in his flight through air to touch his knee to the parapet. His mouth is open and the words of his message seem trembling on his lips. Although all the outlines are severely defined with the sharpness of a Schiavone, the interior modeling is sensitive and delicate and in the case of the Virgin, tender and softly varied, so that the curve of the throat and chin seem almost to ripple with the breathing, the young chest swells in lovely gradation of form under the close bodice, and the whole figure has a graciousness of contour, a slim roundness and elasticity by which it takes its place among Crivelli"s many realizations of his ideal type as at least one of the most lovable if not the most characteristic and personal. Especially fine, also, is the treatment of the drapery in these two admirable little panels. The mantle surrounding the angel billows out in curling folds as eloquent of swift movement as the draperies of Botticelli"s striding nymphs; and the opulent line of the Virgin"s cloak is superb in its lightly broken swirl about the figure. The hair, too, of both the Angel and the Virgin, waves in ma.s.ses at once free and formal, with something of the wild beauty of Botticelli"s windblown tresses. The a.n.a.logy between the two painters, the ardent and poetic Florentine and the no less ardent and at times almost as poetic Venetian (if we accept his own claim to the t.i.tle), might be further dwelt upon, although it would be easy to overemphasize it. One attribute, certainly, they had in common and it is the one that most completely separates each of them from his fellows--the exultant _verve_, that is, with which the human form is made to communicate energy of movement in their compositions. It is impossible to believe that either of them ever painted a tame picture. If, however, Crivelli could not be tame he could be insipid, escaping tameness by what might be called the violence of his affectation. The _St. George_ in the Metropolitan Museum is an instance of his occasional use of a type so frail and languid in its grace and so sentimental in gesture and expression as to suggest caricature. Another example dated 1491 is the _Madonna and Child Enthroned_ in the National Gallery. On either side of the melancholy Madonna are St. Francis and St. Sebastian. The latter is pierced by arrows and tied to a pillar, but so far from wearing the look of suffering or of calm endurance, he has a trivial glance of deprecation for the observer, and his figure is wholly wanting in the force of young manhood. A striking contrast to this effeminate mood may be found in No. 724, also a _Madonna Enthroned_, between St. Jerome and St. Sebastian, a late signed picture of Crivelli"s declining talent, with a predella below the chief panel in which appear St. Catherine, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, the Nativity, the Martyrdom of St.
Sebastian again, and St. George and the Dragon. The little compartment containing the scene of the Nativity is quite by itself among Crivelli"s works for intimate and homely charm. The simplicity of the surroundings and the natural att.i.tudes of the people have an almost Dutch character, borne out by the meticulous care for detail in the execution united to an effect of chiaro-oscuro very rare in early Italian art and hardly to be expected in a painter of Crivelli"s Paduan tendencies. The St. George is more characteristic, with an immense energy in its lines. In arrangement it recalls the St. George of Mrs. Gardiner"s collection and despite its small size is almost the equal of that magnificent example in concentration and fire.
[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
PIETa
_From a panel by Carlo Crivelli_]
Still another type, and one that combines dignity and much spirituality with naive realism, is the _Beato Ferretti_ (No. 668), showing an open landscape with a village street at the right and a couple of ducks in a small pond at the left, the Beato kneeling in adoration with a vision of the _Virgin and Child_ surrounded by the _Mandorla_ or _Verica_ glory appearing above. The kneeling saint is realistically drawn and his face wears an expression of intense piety. The landscape is marked by the bare twisted stems of trees, that seem to repeat the rigid and conceivably tortured form of the saint. A beautiful building with a domed roof is seen at the right. At the top of the picture across the cloud-strewn sky is a festoon of fruits, Crivelli"s characteristic decoration.
[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Stadel Gallery at Frankfort.
A PANEL BY CARLO CRIVELLI (_a_)]
[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Stadel Gallery at Frankfort.
A PANEL BY CARLO CRIVELLI (_b_)]
In all these pictures Crivelli reveals himself as an artist filled with emotional inspiration, to whom the thrill of life is more than its trappings, and one, moreover, who observes, balances and differentiates.
The society of his saints and angels is stimulating; the element of the unexpected enters into his work in open defiance of his p.r.o.nounced mannerism. It is possible to detect beneath the close and manifold coverings of his ornate decoration a swift flame of imaginative impulse such as Blake sent into the world without such covering. He would have pleased Blake by this nervous energy and by his pure bright coloring, despite the fact that he signed himself "Venetus." He painted in tempera and finished his work with care and deliberation. It is remarkable that so little of his mental fire died out in the slow process of his execution. It is still more remarkable that in spite of his reactionary tendencies, his archaistic use of gold and relief at a moment when all great artists were renouncing these, he is intensely modern in his sentiment. He seems to represent a phase of human development at which we in America have but recently arrived; a phase in which appreciation of ancient finished forms of beauty is united to a restless eagerness and the impulse toward exaggerated self-expression. He is supposed to have been born about 1440, which would make him a contemporary of the two Bellini, of Hans Memling and of Mantegna. Had he only been able to give his imagination a higher range--had he possessed a more controlling spiritual ideal, had the touch of self-consciousness that rests like a grimace on the otherwise lovely aspect of much of his painting, been eliminated, he would have stood with these on the heights of fifteenth century art. We are fortunate to have in America the Boston Museum _Pieta_, which shows him in one of his most temperate moods, the _Pieta_ of Mr. Johnson"s collection, which is the emphatic expression of his least restrained moments, the _St. George_ of Mrs. Gardiner"s collection, in which his grasp of knightly character and pictorial grace is at its best, and these two strongly contrasted types of the Metropolitan Museum.
REMBRANDT AT THE Ca.s.sEL GALLERY
VII
REMBRANDT AT THE Ca.s.sEL GALLERY
The art gallery of Ca.s.sel is well known to connoisseurs as containing a group of Rembrandts of the first order. The earliest example is a small painting of a boy"s head supposed to be a portrait of the artist at the age of twenty or one and twenty; Dr. Bode considers 1628 too late rather than too early as the probable date, and the same authority warns us against considering such studies in the light of serious portraiture: "It had never occurred to the young artist," he says, "to make a dignified portrait of himself at the time when he painted these pictures." The execution is clumsy, the color is dull and heavy and of the brownish tone common to Rembrandt"s early painting, and much of the drawing--as in the rings of hair escaping to the surface from the thick curling ma.s.s--is meaningless and indefinite, but the distribution of light and shade is not unlike that of Rembrandt"s later work and the touch has a certain bold freedom that seems to have been his from the first whenever he served as his own model, even while his handling was still hard and prim in his portraits of others. Another work ascribed to his early period, about 1634, is the "Man with a Helmet," also commonly known as a self-portrait, fluent in execution and vivacious and lifelike in expression, yet not without that hint of conscious pose common with the artist in his endeavors to force the note of character.
The blunt, strong features are strikingly like those of the authenticated portraits of the artist, but Dr. Karl Voll, Director of the Alt Pinakothek at Munich, declares that the idea of a "self-portrait," attractive as it is, can hardly in this case be upheld.
Whoever the sitter may have been, the painting is an amazing example of dexterity of hand and acute observation. The sharp glitter of the helmet, the contrasting flesh-like quality of the painting in the face, the light vigorous drawing of the moustache and hair, give an impression of the artist"s mastery of his craft hardly to be surpa.s.sed at any period of his life. Far less poetic in its color-scheme and chiaro-oscuro than the youthful portrait belonging to Mrs. Gardiner"s collection, it is even more eloquent of the ease with which he managed his tools. Of a still greater charm, with subtler problems met and solved, is the portrait of Saskia van Ulenburgh, whom he married in Amsterdam in the year 1634, the probable date of the Ca.s.sel portrait. At all events the young woman carries in her hand a spray of rosemary, the symbol of betrothal, and her dress has the richness of a Dutch bride"s equipment. Here we see Rembrandt"s art in perhaps its most delicate and psychologically interesting phase. The character revealed by the small pretty features has neither extraordinary force nor marked individuality. The lines are neither deep-cut nor broad. One is reminded of a fine little etching in which the plate has been bitten only to a moderate depth and which requires a sensitive handling in the printing to produce anything like richness. Yet the result is rich in the fullest sense of the term. It depends for its quality not only upon the splendid color-scheme formed by the dark red of the velvet hat and gown, the white of the feather, the gold and gray and dull blue of the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and ornaments, the beautiful jewels, with which Rembrandt then as later produced an appearance of great magnificence, the bright red-gold of the hair falling lightly over the softly modeled brow, and the fair warm tones of the flesh glowing as from living health and physical energy: it depends as much upon the deep research into the expression that has resulted in the intimate portraiture possible only to genius and seldom found even in the work of the great masters, never, so far as the writer"s observation has gone, in the work of their later years. The smile that hesitates at the corner of the whimsical little mouth, the tender modulations of surface on the forehead and about the straight-gazing honest eyes, the swift suggestions of movement and play of mood in the flexible contours, the gaiety and sweetness and singular purity of the girlish face, are evoked with magisterial authority and precision. Never surely has there been a finer example of Dutch care and thoroughness in the observation and rendering of minute detail united to breadth of effect. The painting of the jewels and embroideries is wrought to a singularly perfect finish. It is almost as though the artist had set himself to extract the utmost beauty of which the textures of stuffs and gems are capable, to prove how much more enchanting was the beauty of the brilliant blond demure little face daintily poised above them. Dr. Bode calls the picture "one of the most attractive, not only of his early pictures, but of all his works."