the stream of light
across the picture! This is the way to work, my boys, and earn a hundred
florins a day. See! I am as sure of my line as a skater of making his
figure of eight! and down with a sweep goes a brawny arm or a flowing
curl of drapery. The figures arrange themselves as if by magic. The
paint-pots are exhausted in furnishing brown shadows. The pupils look
wondering on, as the master careers over the canvas. Isabel or Helena,
wife No. 1 or No. 2, are sitting by, buxom, exuberant, ready to be
painted; and the children are boxing in the corner, waiting till they
are wanted to figure as cherubs in the picture. Grave burghers and
gentlefolks come in on a visit. There are oysters and Rhenish always
ready on yonder table. Was there ever such a painter? He has been an
ambassador, an actual Excellency, and what better man could be
chosen? He speaks all the languages. He earns a hundred florins a day.
Prodigious! Thirty-six thousand five hundred florins a year. Enormous!
He rides out to his castle with a score of gentlemen after him, like
the Governor. That is his own portrait as St. George. You know he is an
English knight? Those are his two wives as the two Maries. He chooses
the handsomest wives. He rides the handsomest horses. He paints the
handsomest pictures. He gets the handsomest prices for them. That slim
young Van Dyck, who was his pupil, has genius too, and is painting all
the noble ladies in England, and turning the heads of some of them.
And Jordaens--what a droll dog and clever fellow! Have you seen his fat
Silenus? The master himself could not paint better. And his altar-piece
at St. Bavon's? He can paint you anything, that Jordaens can--a drunken
jollification of boors and doxies, or a martyr howling with half his
skin off. What a knowledge of anatomy! But there is nothing like the
master--nothing. He can paint you his thirty-six thousand five hundred
florins' worth a year. Have you heard of what he has done for the French
Court? Prodigious! I can't look at Rubens's pictures without fancying
I see that handsome figure swaggering before the canvas. And Hans
Hemmelinck at Bruges? Have you never seen that dear old hospital of St.
John, on passing the gate of which you enter into the fifteenth century?
I see the wounded soldier still lingering in the house, and tended by
the kind gray sisters. His little panel on its easel is placed at the
light. He covers his board with the most wondrous, beautiful little