of the Alte Pinakothek of Munich, which has generally been accepted as the finest of its type. This last, which is slightly more reposeful and dignified than the others, may date from an early period in the Italian journey.

A certain fatigue is imprinted already on the features of the phenomenally successful and brilliant youth; he is devoured by the energy, feverish rather than truly robust, which must belong to the painter of the St. Martin,' the 'Prendimiento,' the Brazen Serpent,' the Ecce Homo.'

The earliest picture in the exhibition to which a date could be attached was the well-known Christ sinking under the Cross,' from the Church of St. Paul at Antwerp, painted in 1617—that is to say, when the artist was but eighteen years of age. Here, with many crudities and marks of inexperience, such as we should naturally expect to detect under these circumstances, may be noted the extreme breadth and passion of the conception, and the marked power revealed in the modelling of the nude. The painting is raw, and crude to excess in the lights, heavy in the abrupt and opaque shadows. Of exactly the same period as this very early piece is a hitherto not generally known canvas 'The Good Samaritan,' contributed from the collection of Prince Sanguszko in Galicia, and further authenticated by a drawing from the rich collection of M. Léon Bonnat, of Paris. Here, however, the defects arising from inexperience greatly outweigh the qualities. Opportunity was afforded, moreover, for renewing acquaintance with the famous St. Martin dividing his Cloak with a Beggar,' from the Church of Saventhem near Brussels, to which was obstinately attached a romantic legend, now discredited, showing the youthful master detained, like Rinaldo, on the very threshold of his journey to Italy, by a love-idyll, and during the pause thus brought about painting this picture for the church of the temporary halting-place. This pretty story is now shown to be based on no solid foundation, and in lieu of it we must needs put up with the prosaic fact that Van Dyck on his return in 1629 proposed at Saventhem for the hand of Isabella van Ophem, and was refused. But with the legend some modern critics of authority have discarded the previously accepted date of the work (about 1621), and have sought to place it as late as 1629-that is to say, in the second Flemish period-making of it thus a very much later replica of the 'St. Martin' of Windsor Castle. The picture itself, as lately seen in juxtaposition with the earliest works of Van Dyck, completely shatters this new theory. It follows naturally and closely upon the Christ sinking under the Cross' and the Good Samaritan,' showing exactly the same crudities, the same technical characteristics, in a slightly more mature form. The Saventhem 'St. Martin' must have been painted in or before 1621, and it is the precursor, not the reduced version, of the St. Martin' of Windsor, a work VOL. XLVI- No. 273 3 D

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more advanced in style, freer in execution, richer and more pictorial in aspect, if less concentrated in the dramatic expression of the subject. One connecting link between the two pictures is the admirable little sketch in oils of the same subject, contributed by Captain Holford from Dorchester House. It differs in a marked degree from both, yet is manifestly a preparation for the Windsor St. Martin,' and from the point of view of pictorial accomplishment a vast stride in advance of the Saventhem effort. It is much less easy to deal with the 'Brazen Serpent,' sent by Sir Francis Cook from his collection at Richmond. Its relation to the great Brazen Serpent' of Madrid, which has only in comparatively recent years been recognised as a work of Van Dyck's early time, and is still nominally catalogued as a Rubens, is an obvious one. Yet it cannot well be accepted as a preparation for that striking work, in which a higher stage of development, a far greater spontaneity of execution is reached. In the Richmond version there are, side by side with passages of great dignity and beauty, others-especially some women's heads-which either inexperience or limited capacity renders completely inexpressive, while the draperies and the hair are in some passages rendered in a peculiar, scratchy technique, a mechanical impasto, which we do not find again in the early work. Altogether the picture is a great puzzle. If we are to believe, as we well may, that Van Dyck even in his earliest time had pupils, we may attribute a share in it to one of these. The climax of this early manner is reached with the wonderful Prendimiento' or 'Betrayal of Christ,' which was presented by Van Dyck to his master on his departure for Genoa, and preserved among his treasures until his death. This is his greatest dramatic work. Not again will he conceive with this resistless energy, or with a brush certain already in its greatest audacities scatter fire-not literally only-as he goes. Not again will he work in sacred art as independently of example and tradition. That Van Dyck well recognised the value of his conception is proved by the pains which he took with the several extant variations of the subject, the best of which are throughout originals, entirely from his own hand. The comparatively small version sent by Sir Francis Cook is the first original of the series. It is done with a spontaneity, with an unerring certainty and force, for which in a painter of twenty-one years of age it would be almost impossible to find a parallel. Next must come the vast finished version which belonged to Rubens, and now, as the Prendimiento,' hangs in the Prado Gallery. Here the group of Peter and Malchus has been entirely redesigned, and, as regards pictorial effect, for the better. Last in order comes the large finished version contributed by Lord Methuen to the Antwerp exhibition. In this, which is painted with unabated ardour, and with all the skill of which the youthful artist is capable, there are to be noted several important variations. The

group of Peter and Malchus has entirely disappeared, and in the place of the venomous old centurion clad from head to foot in dark mail-the same who does duty in the 'Ecce Homo' of Madrid, and the similar but inferior version at Berlin-appears the noble head of an apostle.

Not the least surprising section of Van Dyck's work at this initial stage is his portraiture, which we are only now by degrees separating from that of Rubens. The work of his pupil and friendly competitor is so frank in the characterisation, so massive in the blocking-out of the heads, so exuberant in vitality, that to have confounded it with the work of Rubens himself is hardly a crime of lèse majesté against the latter. It is only of late years, for instance, that a whole series of portraits of men and women in the Dresden Gallery have been taken away from the elder master and restored to the younger. Then again in the Hermitage we have the great portrait of Rubens's first wife, Isabelle Brant, and the 'Suzanne Fourment with her daughter Catherine,' both of which must clearly be placed to Van Dyck's account, even though M. Max Rooses himself continues to claim them for his hero, Rubens. With these two superb pieces there go perfectly well two others of at least equal beauty, the portraits-belonging to the Serge Stroganoff collection, in the same Imperial city of St. Petersburg-of Nicolas Rockox and his wife. At Antwerp there were four or five examples of the first order, prominent among them being the superb Portrait d'un Syndic,' lent by Madame Edouard André of Paris. This was sold at the Rothan sale as a Jordaens, and as such had, for the sale catalogue, been forcefully if not altogether faithfully etched by Waltner. It is still by some connoisseurs claimed for that painter, but by the majority of competent judges must surely now be accepted as a noble Van Dyck première manière, especially now that opportunities have been afforded for close comparison with such indubitable and first-rate works of the same time as the 'Portrait du Sieur Vinck' (M. François Schollaert), the 'Portrait de Madame Vinck' (M. Paul Dansette), and the 'Portrait d'Homme' (Comte della Faille de Leverghem), a work, this last, which before Rembrandt shows many of Rembrandt's characteristics. The most charming and the most consummate if not the strongest or the most self-assertive piece of this time is Lord Brownlow's Lady with her Child,' sent from Ashridge. Here is foreshadowed already, as it is in but few portraits of the initial period, that feeling for aristocratic grace and reserve which is to be so fully developed in the Genoese, the second Flemish, and the English styles.

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The writer ventures with some confidence to place further in this same category, as early portraits by the master, two of his most famous works, the Van der Gheest' of the National Gallery, which for so long was known and admired as 'Gevartius,' and the

double portrait of Frans Snyders and his wife in the Cassel Gallery. When Van Dyck returned to Antwerp in 1627 or 1628 he painted it may be with greater subtlety and distinction, with great fusion, with a greater power of atmospheric envelopment; but he did not paint thus, with this frankness and breadth of vision as of execution, with this vigorous accent and this well-marked impasto. Moreover, in the case of the Snyders and his Wife' dates are all in favour of the writer's present assumption. The great animal-painter was born in 1579, and would thus in 1621 have been forty-two, whereas he would on Van Dyck's return from his travels have been forty-nine, an age which the grave, handsome personage in the Cassel picture has certainly not reached.

The Genoese, or, more properly, the Italian, period was the one most meagrely represented in the exhibition, and it is here especially that one would have liked to invoke the aid of the Genoese and the English owners. Luckily, through the generosity of the Duke of Abercorn, the organisers of the exhibition were enabled to present one masterpiece of the first order in illustration of this important phase of Van Dyck's art. This was the great full-length 'Paola Adorno, Marchesa Brignole-Sale' from Hampden House, which more than rivals in beauty that better known Paola Adorno' of the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa, round which another romantic legend has been woven, picturesque and suitable enough to the personages involved, even though it be based on as slender a foundation as the Saventhem story. There are differences much more marked than might be imagined between the colour-scheme and the general design of the two great works, while in splendour of aspect and general preservation, the Hampden House picture is now far ahead of its Genoese rival. There is perhaps a more distinct individuality, a greater charm, in the characterisation of the 'Paola Adorno' of Genoa, as she stands in all the freshness and beauty of youth, almost overweighted by the splendour of her costume. We could more readily believe of this Paola the romantic story which binds together for a brief space the lives of the Genoese grande dame and the ardent young Fleming. But the mastery of the painter is much more triumphantly exhibited in the Duke of Abercorn's canvas, in which, instead of the blue robe, by which the Palazzo Rosso portrait is remembered, she wears one of similar mode and equal magnificence, but fashioned of warm white satin and gold. Finer painting of its kind than this portrait exhibits, especially in the costume and accessories, is hardly imaginable. The splendours of the Flemish and the Venetian schools are here united. This work was deservedly-as M. Henri Hymans has recorded in an interesting article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts—one of the successes of the exhibition. A noble if not a very well preserved full-length of the same Genoese period, to which the attractive melancholy of the handsome personage

lends an additional charm, is the Portrait of a Gentleman of the Brignole Family,' lent by Baron Giorgio Franchetti of Venice. The Brussels Gallery included among the pictures lent for the occasion to the sister city a vast full-length, newly acquired for the State museum, and here exhibited as the 'Portrait of Ambrogio Doria, Doge of Genoa;' it was dated, according to the catalogue, 1626. This picture is at a first glance undeniably imposing, presenting as it does to the spectator in his official aspect a handsome and gracious personage, seated in great pomp and rather stiffly, wearing a long robe of black satin, with a toque of peculiar shape, and white ruffles at the neck and wrists. The good impression made at a first glance is not, however, maintained. The more we gaze the more difficult we find it to believe that in 1626, after he had produced the 'Bentivoglio,' the portraits just now described, and other masterpieces of the Italian time, he could have painted flesh so pallid and chalky, shadows so black and opaque as these. It seems much more likely that the canvas is the amplification or imitation of a Van Dyck by some contemporary Genoese artist influenced by him. One thing is certain, and that is that the personage is here wrongly named. In the first place the costume is not that of a Genoese doge in the seventeenth century, but of a Procurator of the Genoese Republic. In the next the dignitary represented is not Ambrogio Doria but Gian Vincenzo Imperiale, a distinguished man of letters of that great family, whose father was the Doge Gian Giacomo Imperiale. This we may gather from a genuine half-length portrait by Van Dyck, of the same nobleman, still preserved by the Marchese Cesare Imperiale at the Villa dell' Albero d' Oro near Genoa. This portrait, seemingly one of great beauty, is reproduced and described at length by Signor Mario Menotti in one of a very interesting series of articles entitled 'Van Dyck a Genova,' and published in the Archivio Storico dell' Arte.

Discretion might suggest an avoidance of discussion in the case of the interesting and technically admirable 'Holy Family,' sent by M. Rodolphe Rann from his magnificent collection in Paris, and set down to Van Dyck's Italian period. The picture makes on a first acquaintance an impression so widely different from anything else in the galleries, or indeed in the œuvre of the great painter, that one's first instinct is to challenge the attribution. A close study of the picture has convinced the writer that it is all the same the right one. The Holy Family' must have been painted very soon after the arrival in Italy, and under an Italian influence which for once is distinctly other than Venetian.

The catalogue is assuredly in error in assigning the well-known ‘Dædalus and Icarus,' lent by Lord Spencer from Althorp, to the period before 1621. This rich-toned and effective piece is markedly and avowedly Titianesque, in the types as in the rendering of the flesh, and can only have been painted in Italy. The contrast between