HISTORICAL SKETCH OF ART trayal of distinguished personages there are few who are his peers. His portraits are not only instinct with life: they fascinate by their dignity of conception and grace of delineation, which, without sacrifice of truthfulness, impart a certain stateliness as well as beauty to the individual represented. In what a rare degree Van Dyck possessed this faculty is best seen in his admirable etchings which are still preserved, and in which he presents us with an invaluable gallery of portraits illustrative of the 17th century. Of the remaining pupils of Rubens few acquired distinction ; but, owing to the copiousness of their works, they are by no means unimportant. They occupy in the department of religious art the entire century. From Diepenbeeck, Erasmus Quellin, Cornelis Schut, and Jan van den Hoecke, Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678) may be distin- guished by a marked individuality. No study in Italy had estranged his thoughts from his native art. His profession of the reformed faith made him unwilling to contribute to the exaltation of the Church’s ideal, so he applied himself to depicting scenes from domestic life and the unrestrained mirth of popular festivities, and thus prepared the way for the formation of that school of genre painting, in which the art of the Netherlands subsequently acquired its chief renown. His often-repeated pictures of the crazy house- concert (‘as the old ones sang, so will the youngsters twitter’), for example, are well known. Jordaens’s humour is unsophisticated ; his figures are as devoid of grace as they well can be; but so sur- passing is the quality of colour in his pictures that one must condone the vein of almost coarse vulgarity which runs through very many of them. Pictures by him at the Bosch, near The Hague, which cel- ebrate the deeds of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange, show what he could accomplish as an historical painter, and belong to the very best contributions of the entire school. Even upon David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690), the greatest genre painter to whom the southern Netherlands have given birth, Rubens exercised an enduring influence. The fairs and rustic scenes which he delighted in depicting fascinate not only by the spirit of conviviality which animates them, but bear witness to a searching observation of nature; and the subtlety of colouring serves of itself to invest the scenes depicted with a true poetic charm. In gradation of tone, in wondrous harmony of colour, in artistic combination, he retains an undisputed supremacy. It is not less wonderful how he can by the most delicate modifications so manipulate a dominant tone of colour as to make it effective, and how he can at his pleasure either assert or dispense with the most marked contrasts. The pictures painted between 1640 and 1650, where the peculiar silvery tone first appears, are those which afford the best insight into this painter's method and style. His works are unfortunately widely seattered, and are rarely to be met with in his native country.