nd fullness which are among the chief charms of oil-painting; but that
upon the whole it would be selected as uniting imperishable firmness
with exquisite delicacy; as approaching more unaffectedly and more
closely than any other work to the simple truths of natural color and
space; and as exhibiting, even in its quaint and minute treatment,
conquest over many of the difficulties which the boldest practice of art
involves.

This picture, bearing the inscription "Johannes Van Eyck (fuit?) hic,
1434," is probably the portrait, certainly the work, of one of those
brothers to whose ingenuity the first invention of the art of
oil-painting has been long ascribed. The volume before us is occupied
chiefly in determining the real extent of the improvements they
introduced, in examining the processes they employed, and in tracing the
modifications of those processes adopted by later Flemings, especially
Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyck. Incidental notices of the Italian system
occur, so far as, in its earlier stages, it corresponded with that of
the north; but the consideration of its separate character is reserved
for a following volume, and though we shall expect with interest this
concluding portion of the treatise, we believe that, in the present
condition of the English school, the choice of the methods of Van Eyck,
Bellini, or Rubens, is as much as we could modestly ask or prudently
desire.

105. It would have been strange indeed if a technical perfection like
that of the picture above described (equally characteristic of all the
works of those brothers), had been at once reached by the first
inventors of the art. So far was this from being the case, and so
distinct is the evidence of the practice of oil-painting in antecedent
periods, that of late years the discoveries of the Van Eycks have not
unfrequently been treated as entirely fabulous; and Raspe, in
particular, rests their claims to gratitude on the contingent
introduction of amber-varnish and poppy-oil:--"Such _perhaps_," he says,
"might have been the misrepresented discovery of the Van Eycks." That
tradition, however, for which the great painters of Italy, and their
sufficiently vain historian, had so much respect as never to put forward
any claim in opposition to it, is not to be clouded by incautious
suspicion. Mr. Eastlake has approached it with more reverence, stripped
it of its exaggeration, and shown the foundations for it in the fact
that the Van Eycks, thou