is
son.

The latter, DAVID TENIERS the younger, was born in 1610. He was
nicknamed the Ape of painting, from his powers of imitation. The
Archduke Leopold William made him a gentleman of his bedchamber, and he
made copies of all his pictures. He came to England to buy several
Italian pictures for Count Fuensaldegna, who on his return heaped
favours upon him. Don John of Austria and the King of Spain set so great
a value upon his pictures that they built a gallery set apart to
preserve them--there are no less than fifty-two in the Prado Gallery
to-day.

His principal talent was landscape adorned with small figures. He
painted men drinking and smoking, alchemists, corps de garde,
temptations of S. Anthony, and country fairs and merry-makings. His
small pictures are superior to his large ones. His execution displays
the greatest ease; the leafing of his trees is light, his skies are
admirable: his small figures have an exquisite expression and a most
lively touch, and the characters are marked out with the greatest truth.
From the thinness of the colours his works seem to have been finished at
once; they are generally clear in all their parts, and Teniers had the
art, without dark shades, to relieve his lights by other lights, so well
managed as to produce the effect he wanted, an art which few besides
himself have attained. He died at Antwerp in 1694.

FRANS SNYDERS was born at Antwerp in the year 1587, ten years later,
that is to say, than Rubens. He received his first instruction in the
art of painting from Henry van Balen. His genius at first displayed
itself only in painting fruit. He afterwards attempted animals, in
which kind of study he succeeded so well that he surpassed all that had
ever excelled before him. He stayed for some time in Italy, and the
works he met with there by Castiglione proved a spur to his genius to
attempt outdoing him in painting animals. When he returned to Flanders
he fixed his ordinary abode at Brussels, where he was made painter to
the Archduke and Duchess, and became attached to the house of Spain.
Twenty-two of his pictures are in the Prado Gallery.

When Snyders required large figures in his compositions both Rubens and
Jordaens took pleasure in assisting him, and Rubens in turn borrowed the
assistance of Snyders to paint the ground of his pictures; thus they
mutually assisted each other in their labours, while Snyders' manly and
vigorous manner was quite able to hold its own even