towards the Church, but they soon passed beyond the stage where they thought it entitled to all their treas ures. Hence, even in these early days, secular architecture, one of the best measures of the wealth and refinement of a nation, had attained to great importance, covering the land with town-halls and other public buildings, which are still the delight and wonder of the artist.*

England, at an early period, had her cathedrals built mainly under foreign influences; but we look there in vain for any sign of devotion to art in any other public structures, until we come to comparatively modern days. When now we descend to the dwellings of the people, the contrast is no less marked. At a time when the private houses in England were of the most primitive character, differing, as to the middle classes, but little from those described by Tacitus in his "Germania" fifteen centuries before, the cities of the Netherlands were studded over with private palaces of marble.† Even in the thirteenth century the principal Flemish towns contained Turkish baths, their streets were paved and kept in good order, while the houses of the wealthy

Burgher opulence and energy are grandly and vigorously expressed in the secular buildings of these towns. For example, we have the Hall of the Cloth-makers,' now the Town Hall of Ypres, 1200-1364; Town Hall at Bruges, begun 1284; Council House at Bruges, 1377; Council House at Brussels, 1401-55; the still more magnificent Town Hall at Louvain, belonging to the second half of the fifteenth century; and that at Oudenarde, built in 1527-30.”— Lübke's "History of Art," ii. 24–27.

In what is known in history as the "Spanish Fury," in 1576, the Spaniards destroyed in Antwerp alone "at least five hundred palaces, mostly of marble and hammered stone." - Motley's "Dutch Republic," iii. 115.

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burghers were built of stone and supplied with chimneys.*

Nor was the contrast with the English dwellings confined to their external appearance alone. Entering those of the Netherlanders, one would have seen them filled with paintings, tapestry, linen, brass, and costly furniture, such as could be found in no other quarter of the globe. Albert Dürer visited the country in 1520. It seems by his "Journal" that although he had lived in Italy, he was lost in wonder and delight at the magnificent buildings, the costly furniture, the artistic ornaments, the rich clothing, and the general display of wealth and splendor which he found in the Low Countries.+

If architecture was at first the result of a German and then of a Norman or French impulse, its junior, painting, was probably due to the influence of Italy, although exerted through the medium of the German cities on the Rhine. Here, however, the pupil more than

*Hutton's "Van Arteveld."

+ The picture of John Arnolfini and his wife, one of the treasures in the National Gallery at London, painted by Jan Van Eyck, who was born about 1380, shows a Flemish interior which is very suggestive. The subjects are a well-to-do merchant and his wife standing in their bedroom holding hands. The furniture consists of a handsome bedstead, with an upright carved chair by the side, and a carved bench along the wall. Right opposite the spectator is a convex mirror set in a frame adorned with little medallion paintings. In the centre of the room hangs a fine bronze chandelier, and beyond is a glazed window with an orange on the sill. The painting is signed "Jan Van Eyck was here," and no certificate could be stronger as to the veracity of its details. See Conway's "Early Flemish Artists," p. 149. In a later chapter we shall see how English houses were constructed and furnished, even in the days of Elizabeth.

repaid the master. The earliest dawn of the art in modern Europe, as shown in fresco and distemper, is found on the southern side of the Alps; but modern painting in oil, the art which glows on the canvas of a Raphael, a Titian, or a Rembrandt, had its origin in the Netherlands. Most authorities, from the days of Vasari, have credited the discovery of oil-painting to the brothers Van Eyck, who painted at The Hague, Ghent, and Bruges, during the latter part of the fourteenth and the early part of the fifteenth century. This, perhaps, is not exactly correct, for oil was used in this country long before their era. Nor were they the first artists of the Netherlands in point of time. For centuries the churches had been filled with paintings which seem to have possessed considerable merit.* The moist climate, however, has worked destruction to most of the wall productions, on which the reputation of the early artists was based, so that we can judge of them only from contemporaneous reports.+

But there was something besides the climate. The churches of Italy, with their wide walls and broad roof spaces, afforded scope for fresco decoration which was wanting in the structures of a Gothic type, with their arches, pillars, and groined roofs. Hence the Netherland paintings were of a different class, being smaller and mostly executed on wooden panels. The groundwork of the panel was prepared with a thin coating of fine plaster, and upon this coating the colors were laid,

* In 1143, a fire consumed the principal churches in Utrecht and destroyed "a number of magnificent paintings."-Davies's "Holland," i. 41.

We have a few excellent Flemish wall paintings, and some meritorious panel pictures of the fourteenth century. Conway, p. 126.

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being mixed with the white of an egg or the juice of unripe figs. Oil was employed, but its use was attended with great disadvantages. It was difficult to lay the colors finely with it, and they took a long time to dry. For this reason it was never used in the finished part of the work, but only for large masses of drapery and the like. The great objection to this process lay in the fact, not then discovered to its full extent, however, that in time the whole mass flaked off, leaving nothing but the bare surface of the panel. To the Van Eyck brothers is due the credit of remedying this defect. They mixed some substance, probably resin, with boiled oil, and found that they now had a medium which dried without exposure to the sun, and with which the finest and most delicate work could be accomplished. Using this substance, the plaster on the panel was interpenetrated with the varnish, and the whole wrought so finely together that at last the surface became like enamel, and it is generally next to impossible to detect the traces of the brush.* The discovery of the Van Eycks not only gave paintings a finer character, but made them substantially indestructible by time. It was carried to Italy by the artists from that country, who in great numbers were then studying in the Netherlands, and a century later was brought to completion in the studios of Venice under the hands of Titian and his fellows.

The Van Eyck brothers are, however, entitled to much greater honor than that of discovering a new process in art. They were the crowning figures in a school which had been in existence for two or three centuries at least, and they were the greatest painters of the age. Together

* Conway's "Early Flemish Artists," pp. 116-119.

"Their era," says Lübke, "is so glorious, so untrammelled and

they painted the world-renowned picture of the "Adoration of the Lamb," at St. Bavon's Church, in Ghent. The finest part of this grand work is attributed to the elder brother, Hubert, who was born in 1366; but tne remainder, conceded to the younger, is also of extraor dinary merit. Looking at this picture, and at the later paintings of the younger brother, we feel that we have come into a new world of art. Here are no longer mere personified qualities or abstractions, as among the Italians, but real human beings, men painted as they looked on earth. Hence we have in Jan Van Eyck the originator of the modern school of portrait-painters, in which Flanders and Holland were to lead the world. But there is something more about these pictures. Viewing the paintings which precede this era, we find as a background for the figures nothing but a plain surface or a mass of gilt. In the "Adoration of the Lamb," we see for the first time a fine landscape as a background.* This innovation also marks an epoch. Thenceforth the painters of the Low Countries abjured their gilt; the background becomes from year to year more important, until Joachim Patinier, born in 1490, makes it the prominent feature of his pictures, and becomes the founder of the modern Northern school of landscape painting.+ Thus we find that painting follows, among this people, the same course as its elder sister, architecture. France it was said that only what was executed for the Church or king was art. This was true of most coun

In

magnificent, that the corresponding period in Italy scarcely bears comparison with it."-"History of Art," ii. 420-429. Conway's

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Early Flemish Artists;" Eastlake's "History of Oil - Painting;" Taine's "Art in the Netherlands," etc.

*Conway, p. 271.

Grimm's "Life of Michael Angelo,” ii. 53.

+ Lübke, ii. 452.