past ten years—­may easily be seen in a few days, setting aside the museums and churches.  The quay promenade brings you to the old Steen Castle, and the Town Hall with its salle des marriages, its mural paintings by the industrious Baron Leys—­frigid in style and execution—­will repay you for the trouble.  The vestibules and galleries are noteworthy.  We enjoyed the facades of the ancient guild houses on the market-place and watching the light play upon the old-time scarred front of the cathedral that stands in the Place Verte.  Then there are the Zoological Garden, the Plantin Museum, the Theatre Flamand, the various monuments, and the spectacle of the busy, lively city for those who do not go to Antwerp for its art.  You may even go to Hoboken, a little town in the suburbs not at all like the well-known Sunday resort in Jersey.

The Royal Museum is displayed in a large square.  It is a handsome structure and the arrangement of the various galleries is simple.  The Rubenses, thirty-odd in all, are the piece de resistance, and the Flemish and Dutch Primitives of rare beauty.  Bruges is better for Memling, Brussels for Van der Weyden, Ghent for the Van Eycks, yet Antwerp can boast a goodly number of them all.  She exceeds Brussels in her Rubenses for the larger altar pieces are here, just as at Amsterdam the Rembrandts, while not numerous, take precedence because of The Syndics and The Night Watch.  The tumultuous, overwhelming Peter Paul is in his glory at Antwerp.  You think of some cataclysm when facing these turbulent, thrilling canvases.  If Raphael woos, Rubens stuns.  In the company of Michel Angelo and Balzac or Richard Wagner he would be their equal for torrential energy and vibrating humanity.  Not so profound as Buonarroti, not so versatile as Balzac, he is their peer in sheer savagery of execution.  Setting aside the miles of pictures signed by him though painted by his pupils, he must have covered multitudes of canvas.  Like men of his sort of genius, he ends by making your head buzz and your eyes burn; and then, the sameness of his style, the repetition of his wives and children’s portraits, the apotheosis of the Rubens family!  He portrayed Helena Fourment and Isabella Brandt in all stages of disarray and gowns.  He put them together on the same canvas.  He did not hesitate to show them to the world in all their opulent nudity.  Their white skins, large eyes with wide gaze, their lovely children appear in religious and mythologic pictures at every turn you make in this museum.  You become too familiar with them.  You learn to know that one wife was slenderer than the other; you also realise that other days had other ways.  Titian painted the portrait of a noble dame quite naked and placed her husband, soberly attired, near by.  No one criticised the taste of this performance.  Manet, who was no Titian, did the same trick and was voted wicked.  He actually dared to show us Nana dressing in the presence of a gentleman who sat in the same room with his hat on.