en possible to make any sense of them.
In the foreground are masses of flowers most carefully painted, and
so accurately drawn that botanists have been able to identify them
all; several do not grow in the north of Europe. The town at the back
is something like Jerusalem as it looked in Hubert van Eyck's own day.
A few of the buildings can be identified still, and a general view
of Jerusalem taken in 1486, sixty years after the death of Hubert,
bears some resemblance to the town in this picture. The city is painted
in miniature, much as it would look if you saw it from near at hand.
Every tower, house, and window is there. You can even count the
battlements. The great building with the dome in the middle of the
picture, is the Mosque of Omar, which occupies the supposed site of
Solomon's Temple.

Some people have thought that perhaps Hubert van Eyck, and his brother
John, actually went to the East. Many men made pilgrimages in those
days, and almost every year parties of Christian pilgrims went to
Jerusalem. It was a rough and even a dangerous journey, but not at
all impossible for a patient traveller. Dr. Hulin, who has made
wonderful discoveries about the early Flemish painters, found a
mention, in an old sixteenth-century list, of a 'Portrait of a Moorish
King or Prince' by Van Eyck, painted in 1414 or perhaps 1418. If he
painted a portrait of an oriental prince, he may have visited one
oriental country at least, or at any rate the south of Spain. Probably
enough during that journey he made studies of the cypress, stone-pine,
date-palm, olive, orange, and palmetto, which occur in his pictures.
They grow in the south of Spain and other Mediterranean regions, but
not in the cold north where Hubert spent most of his days.

It is difficult at first to realize what an innovation it was for Hubert
van Eyck to paint such a landscape. In the Richard II. diptych there
is just a suggestion of brown earth for the saints to stand upon, but
the rest of the background is of gold, as was the common practice at
the time. The great innovator, Giotto, in some of his pictures had
attempted to paint landscape backgrounds. In his fresco of St. Francis
preaching to the birds there is a tree for them to perch on, but it
seems more like a garden vegetable than a tree. Even his buildings
look as though they might fall together any moment like a pack of cards.
Hubert not only gives landscape a larger place than it ever had in
any great pict