honourable mention.
Since the death of the last Marquis of Breadalbane these travelled 'Van
Dycks' have gone back to the English representative of the Rich family.

Van Dyck had forty pounds for a half, and sixty pounds for a
whole-length picture;--for a large piece of the King, Queen, and their
children, he had a hundred pounds. For the Wilton family picture he had
five hundred and twenty-five pounds. But Van Dyck soon impaired his
fortune. He was not content with having a country-house at Eltham in
Kent, where he spent a portion of each summer; he would emulate in his
expenditure the most spendthrift noble of that reign. 'He always went
magnific so good a table in his apartment that few princes were more
visited and better served.' His marriage was not calculated to teach him
moderation. In his thirty-ninth year the King gave him the hand of Marie
Ruthven, who was nearly related to the unhappy Earl of Gowrie. She was
his niece, her father having been the scarcely less unhappy younger
brother Patrick, a physician, who, apprehended when a young man on the
charge of being concerned in the treason of his elder brothers, spent
his manhood in the Tower. He was kept a prisoner there from 1584 to
1619, nearly forty years, and was only released in his age and infirmity
when his mind was giving way. Patrick Ruthven's infant daughter had been
adopted, either through charity or perversity, by Anne of Denmark, and
brought up first at the court of Anne, and afterwards at that of
Henrietta Maria. The assertion that Marie Ruthven was a very beautiful
woman has been contradicted. It was said that 'she was bestowed in
marriage on Sir Antony Van Dyck as much to humble further the already
humbled and still detested family of Ruthven, as to honour the painter;
but this does not seem consistent with King Charles's known favour for
Van Dyck. Yet such a view might have been entertained by Marie Ruthven
herself, who, according to tradition, held herself degraded by the
marriage, and never forgave the degradation. She was not a loving wife
to a man who could hardly have been a very loving or loyal husband. And
certainly the marriage did not unite the painter closer to the king.

With his professional industry, Van Dyck combined an equally
unquenchable love of pleasure, which, with his luxurious and sedentary
habits, induced paroxysms of gout, from which Rubens also suffered
severely. This must have ultimately disqualified him for good work, a