The gold background in the original shines out brilliantly, for after the gold was laid on, it was polished with an agate, which gives it a burnished effect, and then the little patterns were carefully punched so as not to pierce the gold and thereby expose the white ground beneath.  There is a jewel-like quality in the colour such as you can see in manuscripts of the time, and it is possible that the painter may have learned his art as an illuminator of manuscripts.  Artists in those days seldom confined themselves to one kind of work.  We do not know this man’s name, and are not even certain whether he was French or English.

Before, as in the time of Richard, painting had been mainly a decorative art, and the object of making pictures was to adorn the pages of a book, or the walls and vaults of a building.  The most vital artistic energies of Western Europe in the thirteenth century had gone into the building of the great cathedrals and abbeys, which are to-day the glory of that period.  Most medieval paintings that still exist in England are decorative wall-paintings of this kind, and only traces of a few remain.  In many country places you can see poor and faded vestiges of painting which adorned church walls in the thirteenth century, and occasionally you may come upon a bit by some chance better preserved.  These old wall-paintings were done upon the dry plaster.  The discovery, or rather the revival, of ‘fresco’ painting (that is, of painting done upon the wet surface of freshly plastered walls, a more durable process) was made in Italy and did not penetrate to England.

Richard II. was not the only art-loving King of his time.  You have read of John, King of France, who was taken prisoner at the Battle of Poitiers by the Black Prince, father of Richard.  During his captivity he lived in considerable state in London at the Savoy Palace, which occupied the site of the present Savoy Hotel in the Strand; he brought his own painter from France with him, who painted his portrait which still exists in Paris.  This King John was the father of four remarkable sons, Charles V., King of France, with whom Edward III. and the Black Prince fought the latter part of the Hundred Years’ War; Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy; John, Duke of Berry; and Louis, Duke of Anjou.  In this list, all are names of remarkable men and great art-patrons, about whom you may some day read interesting things.  Numerous lovely objects still in existence were made for them, and would not have been made at all if they had not been the men they were.  It was only just becoming possible in the fourteenth century for a prince to be an art-patron.  That required money, and hitherto even princes had rarely been rich.  The increasing wealth of England, France, and Flanders at this time was based upon the wool industry and the manufacture and commerce to which it gave rise.  The Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords to this day sits on a woolsack, which is a reminder of the time when the woolsacks of England were the chief source of the wealth of English traders.