Kenelm Digby, to the pursuit of the philosopher's stone, and, needless to say, the results of his experiments and the money he expended upon them only aggravated the state of his health. He rapidly sickened, and died in London on December 9th, 1641, when forty-two years of age. He was accorded a magnificent funeral in St. Paul's Cathedral, and was buried in a tomb beside that of John of Gaunt.

V

VAN DYCK'S POSITION IN ART

During the past twenty years the public has become so educated in matters artistic that it wishes at once to definitely assign a certain position to an artist with whose works it is familiar. We live in an age of comparison, and as opportunities for its exercise, owing to the cheapening of travel, are so manifestly improved of recent years, a more just estimation exists in the mind of the public regarding an artist's worth than formerly. Van Dyck, as I said at the beginning of the opening chapter, has never fallen from the high position he occupied in his own day. He has always appealed to the student and the artist of every nationality, and if we survey portrait painting since his day, we shall see that he has exercised more influence than any other artist who has ever lived. It may be said that Titian, for a couple of centuries after his death, was the idol almost exclusively worshipped, and that during the last fifty years Velazquez and Rembrandt have been the ideals painters have dangled before the public and themselves. But both of these mighty masters have had their ups and downs. The genius of Rembrandt was certainly not appreciated until the end of the eighteenth century, and even then his stupendous powers were not recognised as they have been in our own day.

The worship of Velazquez is quite a modern institution, and it is not at all unlikely, in the opinion of well-informed critics, that if his influence, which has now reached a decadent stage, is not curtailed it will create as much havoc amongst modern portrait painters as the example of Constable has had upon certain phases of landscape painting.

It can never be laid to the charge of Van Dyck that any period of his art has exercised a permanently baneful influence. True, immediately after the Restoration, a school arose, headed by Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller, who claimed to have followed the traditions of Van Dyck. It requires, however, but little comparison between even his later and slighter works and those of Lely, who was incomparably the greatest of the portrait painters working in England in the interval between Van Dyck and Hogarth, to see how far below Van Dyck's standard portrait painting had fallen, and how little of his method there was left in it.

Van Dyck has exercised more influence in England than abroad. Many of our greatest eighteenth-century portrait painters have largely formed themselves upon his example. Gainsborough was the most conspicuous instance of this. From his earliest days he worshipped the great Fleming, and that the spell never left him may be gauged from his dying words: "We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company." Even prior to his departure for Bath, his portraits possessed many of the qualities of Van Dyck, but after arriving in the western city, then the centre of a rich and fashionable world, he had manifold opportunities of studying his favourite master. His brushwork became at once more refined, his colouring more transparent, and his method in every way more facile. Before leaving Bath he had produced portraits which are worthy to be placed alongside those of Van Dyck, and after a few years' residence in London had created those marvels of the brush which contend for supremacy with the finest works of the Fleming. For example, what portrait of the latter master could be cited to surpass the portrait of Mrs. Graham in the Gallery at Edinburgh, the superb group at Dulwich, or the "Blue Boy," in the possession of the Duke of Westminster?

Reynolds appears to have worked more in emulation of Titian than Van Dyck. He painted in a solider and apparently slower manner, and if the slickness—if I may be allowed an Americanism—of the Flemish master appealed to him, it yet had no visible effect upon his own technique.

The minor masters of our school demonstrate materially how much they owed to Van Dyck. Allan Ramsay and Cotes bear adequate witness of this.

Full justice, however, has not been done to the good wrought for English art by his immediate followers and pupils. It is only of late years that the portraits of old Stone are beginning to be sorted out from those of the later period of Van Dyck. Stone was occupied in copying or making replicas of the portraits of Van Dyck, and so well did he succeed in his task that, even to this day, numerous works by him are to be found in the country houses of England passing under the name of the great master.

PLATE VIII.—THE MARCHESE CATTANEO

(In the National Gallery)

In spite of its somewhat bad condition this portrait is an excellent specimen of Van Dyck's Genoese period. It was achieved about the same time as the two magnificent pictures in the Scottish National Gallery, the Lomellini family and the portrait of an unknown Italian nobleman. Its recent entry into the National Gallery filled a gap in our representation of the great Fleming.

Plate VIII.

Then we have William Dobson, whose works are worthy of yet more study than has hitherto been accorded them. He did not long survive Van Dyck, dying in 1646 at the early age of thirty-six. He was probably the most gifted of all his pupils, and had he lived at any other period would probably have been held in great estimation. There is an excellent example of his brush in the National Gallery, the portrait of Endymion Porter, groom of the bedchamber of Charles I. In many of the other examples strewn about the country he shows yet a greater approach to Van Dyck. Still, the Trafalgar Square picture is a worthy example of his powers at his best. His masculine handling and sense of colour place him, from a purely artistic point of view, far above such men as Lely and Kneller, who followed him.

Another painter who wrought excellent work under the Commonwealth was Robert Walker. He was much patronised by Oliver Cromwell and his party. He appears to have been one of the few portrait painters who flourished at this time. He acquired in a remarkable manner the liquid and transparent style affected by Van Dyck during his last years in England, and coupling with this remarkable powers of fidelity, his portraits possess great attractions for the artist as well as the student of history.

As I have already said, the influence of Van Dyck upon the painters who flourished throughout the three succeeding reigns was a decadent one. Sir Peter Lely, who came to England, at the age of twenty-three, with the Prince of Orange, the son-in-law of Charles I., was the best of all these men. He was born in Westphalia, of Dutch parentage, and was educated in the school of Pieter Fransz de Grebber at Haarlem. But his entire method was built upon Van Dyck. He seems not to have had a bad time under the Commonwealth, for he was employed to paint Cromwell's portrait. It is said that he had instructions upon this occasion to paint him, "warts, pimples, and all." It was not, however, till Charles II. had ascended the throne that he reached the zenith of his fame. Then came the long series of ladies of the Court with which we are so familiar. They are all set in the same artificial setting, a landscape half conventional, half natural in feeling, a languid and somewhat haughty air about the