inet and
chair prevent the colour scheme from being cold. The flesh is very pale
and ivory-like in tone, but the dress is enlivened by little crisp
scarlet and gold touches in the narrow laces which tie the sleeves.

The little picture is a gem of painting and truth of tone, and at the
same time might well suggest a charming scheme of colour to an
ornamentist.

[Van Eyck]

Examine the Van Eyck in the same way, and we shall find a very rich but
quiet scheme of colour in a lower key, highly decorative, yet presented
with extraordinary realistic force, united with extreme refinement and
exquisite chiaroscuro, and truth of tone and value, as a
portrait-picture, and piece of interior lighting.

It is like taking an actual peep into the inner life of a Flemish
burgher of the fifteenth century.

One seems to breathe the still air of the quiet room, the gray daylight
falling through the leaded casements, one of which stands open, and
shows a narrow strip of luminous sky and suggestion of a garden with
scarlet blossoms in green leaves.

The man is clad in a long mantle of claret-brown velvet edged with fur,
over black tunic and hose. He wears a quaint black hat upon his head,
which almost foreshadows the tall hat of the modern citizen. The pale
strange face looks paler and stranger beneath it, but is in character
with the long thin hands. The figure gives one the impression of legal
precision and dryness, and a touch of clerical formality. The wife is of
a buxom and characteristic Flemish type, in a grass-green robe edged
with white fur, over peacock blue; a crisp silvery white head-dress; a
dark red leather belt with silver stitching. Her figure is relieved upon
the subdued red of the bed hangings, continued in the cover of the
settle and the red clogs. The wall of the room, much lost in transparent
shade, is of a greenish gray tone, and in the centre, between the
figures, a circular convex mirror sparkles on the wall reflecting the
backs of the figures. Thin lines delicately repeat the red in the mirror
frame, which has a black and red inner moulding. A string of amber beads
hangs on the wall, and repeats the shimmer of the bright brass
candelabra which hangs aloft, and which is drawn carefully enough for a
craftsman to reproduce.

[Pattern-Pictures]

Both designer and painter may find abundant sugge