by his own hands, or by the hands he taught and guided, with
great skill and speed. He painted also beautiful portraits of his wife
and family, and pictures of his own medieval castle, which he restored
and inhabited during the last years of his life, with views of the
country stretching out in all directions. He liked a comfortable life
and comfortable-looking people. He painted his own wives as often as
Rembrandt painted Saskia; both were plump enough to make our memories
recur with pleasure to the slenderer figures preferred by Botticelli
and the painters of his school.

To accomplish the great mass of historic, symbolic, and ceremonial
painting that still crowds the walls of the galleries of Europe, Rubens
needed many assistants and pupils, but only one of them, Van Dyck,
rose to the highest rank as a painter.

He was a Fleming by birth, and worked in the studio at Antwerp for
several years as an assistant of Rubens; then he went to Italy to learn
from the great pictures of the Italian Renaissance, as so many Northern
artists wished to do. It has been said that the works of Titian
influenced his youthful mind the most. Van Dyck spent three years in
Genoa, where he was employed by those foremost in its life to paint
their portraits. Many of these superb canvases have been dispersed
to enrich the galleries of both hemispheres, public and private; but
the proud, handsome semblances of some of his sitters, dressed in rich
velvet, pearls, and lace, look down upon us still from the bare walls
of their once magnificent palaces, with that 'grand air' for which
the eye and the brush of Van Dyck have long remained unrivalled.

When he returned to Flanders from Italy, he had attained a style of
painting entirely his own and very different from that of his great
master, Rubens. The William II of Orange picture is an excellent
example of Van Dyck's work. The child is a prince: we know it as plainly
as if Van Dyck had spoken the word before unveiling his canvas. His
erect attitude, his dignified bearing, his perfect self-possession
and ease, show that he has been trained in a high school of manners.
But there is also something in the delicate oval of the face, the
well-cut nose and mouth, and the graceful growth of the hair, that
speak of refined breeding. Distinction is the key-note of the picture.

[Illustration: WILLIAM II. OF ORANGE
From the picture by Van Dyck, in the Hermitage Gallery, Leningrad]

This little Prince ha