plomatic
mission, this time to England. The choice of an ambassador could not
have fallen on anyone better calculated to suit the personal character
of Charles I., who was a passionate lover of art and easily captivated
by men of cultivated intellect and refined manners. Rubens therefore, in
whom the most admirable and attractive qualities were united to the
rarest genius as an artist, soon succeeded in winning the attention and
regard of the king. At Paris, too, Rubens had made friends with
Buckingham, who had purchased his whole collection of statues,
paintings, and other works of art for about ten thousand pounds.

It was during his stay in London that he painted the picture now in the
National Gallery, called _Peace and War_ (No. 46). This was intended as
an allegory representing the blessings of peace and the horrors of war,
which he presented to the king as a tangible recommendation of the
pacific measures which he had come to propose. After the dispersion of
the Royal Collection during the Commonwealth this picture was acquired
by the Doria family at Genoa, where it was called, oddly enough,
_Rubens's Family_. As a matter of fact the children are those of
Balthazar Gerbier. He also painted the _S. George and the Dragon_,
which is now at Windsor Castle, and made the sketches for the nine
pictures on the ceiling of the Banqueting Hall--now the United Service
Institution Museum--in Whitehall. It was on this occasion, too, that he
received the honour of knighthood from Charles I., who is said to have
presented him with his own sword.

In the following year, 1630, Rubens married his second wife, Helena
Fourment, who was only sixteen years old--he was now fifty-two or
fifty-three. She belonged to one of the richest and most respectable
families in Antwerp, and was by no means unworthy of the compliment of
being painted in the character of the Virgin receiving instruction from
S. Anne, in the picture which is still at Antwerp.

In 1633 his painting was again interrupted by a diplomatic mission, this
time to Holland; and his remaining years were subject to more
distressing interruptions, from the gout, to which he finally succumbed
in 1640.

When we come to consider the English School of painting we shall see how
much of its revival in the middle of the eighteenth century was due to
the personality as well as to the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In the
Netherlands, likewise, it was not merely a great painter that wa