The heavy-flanked Percheron horses are of the same order as the Rubens women.  The Flemings are mighty feeders, mighty breeders, good-tempered, pleasure-loving folk.  They don’t work as hard as the Dutch, and they indulge in more feasting and holidays.  The North seems austere and Protestant when compared with this Roman Catholic land.  Its sons of genius, such as Rubens and Van Dyck, painted pictures that do not reveal the deeper faith of the Primitives.  No Christ or Mary of either Van Dyck or Rubens sounds the poignant note of the Netherlandish unknown mystic masters.

But what a banquet of beauty Rubens spreads for the eye!  With him painting reached its apogee, and in him were the seeds of its decadence.  He shattered the Florentine line; he, a tremendous space-composer when he so wished, wielded his brush at times like a scene-painter on a debauch.  The most shocking, the loveliest things happen on his canvases.  Set the beautiful Education of the Virgin, in this gallery, beside such a work as Venus and Vulcan at Brussels, and you will see the scale in which he sported.  Or the Virgin and Parrot, with a child Christ who might have posed as a youthful Adonis, and the Venus Frigida—­both in Antwerp.  A pagan was Rubens, for all his religion.  We prefer the Christ Crucified between Two Thieves or the Christ on the Cross, the single figure, to the more famous Descent at the Cathedral.  But what can be said that is new about Rubens or Van Dyck?  In the latter may be noted the beginnings of deliquescence.  He is a softened Rubens, a Rubens aristocratic.  The portraits here are prime, those of the Bishop of Antwerp, Jean Malderus, and of the young girl with the two dogs.  His various Christs are more piteous to behold than those of his master, Rubens.  The feminine note is present, and without any of the realism which so shocks in the conceptions of the Primitives.  Nevertheless we turn to his portraits or to the little boy standing at a table.  There is the true key of Van Dyck.  He met Rubens as a portraitist and took no odds of him.

Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve is a variation of the picture in the Brussels gallery.  A Gossaert portrait catches the eye, the head and bust of a man; then you find yourself staring in wonderment at the Peter Breughels and Jerome Bosches with their malodorous fantastic versions of temptations of innumerable St. Anthonys.  The air is thick with monsters, fish-headed and splay of foot.  St. Anthony must have had the stomach of an ostrich and the nerves of a politician to endure such sights and sounds and witches.  Such females!  But Peter and his two sons are both painters of interest.  There are better Teniers in Brussels, though Le Chanteur is admirable.  Ostade’s Smoker is a masterpiece.  Only four Rembrandts, the portrait of a woman, according to Vosmaer and W. Burger that of his wife Saskia; a fisherman’s boy, the Burgomaster, and the Old Jew.  Dr. Bode thinks that the last two are by Nikolas Maes.  The portrait of Eleazer Swalmius—­the so-called Burgomaster Six—­is finely painted as to head and beard.  The Antwerp Museum paid two hundred thousand francs for the work.  We must not forget mention of a David Teniers, a loan of Dr. Bredius, a still-life, a white dead goose superb in tone.