In his life as in his art he was exuberant.  An absurd anecdote of the time is good enough to show that.  Some people, who went to visit him in his studio at Antwerp, wrote afterwards that they found him hard at work at a picture, whilst at the same time he was dictating a letter, and some one else was reading aloud a Latin work.  When the visitors arrived he answered all their questions without leaving off any of those three occupations!  We must not all hope to match Rubens.

Rubens’s great ceremonial paintings, containing numerous figures and commemorating historical scenes in honour of his Royal patrons, were executed by his own hands, or by the hands he taught and guided, with great skill and speed.  He painted also beautiful portraits of his wife and family, and pictures of his own medieval castle, which he restored and inhabited during the last years of his life, with views of the country stretching out in all directions.  He liked a comfortable life and comfortable-looking people.  He painted his own wives as often as Rembrandt painted Saskia; both were plump enough to make our memories recur with pleasure to the slenderer figures preferred by Botticelli and the painters of his school.

To accomplish the great mass of historic, symbolic, and ceremonial painting that still crowds the walls of the galleries of Europe, Rubens needed many assistants and pupils, but only one of them, Van Dyck, rose to the highest rank as a painter.

He was a Fleming by birth, and worked in the studio at Antwerp for several years as an assistant of Rubens; then he went to Italy to learn from the great pictures of the Italian Renaissance, as so many Northern artists wished to do.  It has been said that the works of Titian influenced his youthful mind the most.  Van Dyck spent three years in Genoa, where he was employed by those foremost in its life to paint their portraits.  Many of these superb canvases have been dispersed to enrich the galleries of both hemispheres, public and private; but the proud, handsome semblances of some of his sitters, dressed in rich velvet, pearls, and lace, look down upon us still from the bare walls of their once magnificent palaces, with that ‘grand air’ for which the eye and the brush of Van Dyck have long remained unrivalled.

When he returned to Flanders from Italy, he had attained a style of painting entirely his own and very different from that of his great master, Rubens.  The William II of Orange picture is an excellent example of Van Dyck’s work.  The child is a prince:  we know it as plainly as if Van Dyck had spoken the word before unveiling his canvas.  His erect attitude, his dignified bearing, his perfect self-possession and ease, show that he has been trained in a high school of manners.  But there is also something in the delicate oval of the face, the well-cut nose and mouth, and the graceful growth of the hair, that speak of refined breeding.  Distinction is the key-note of the picture.