Great was the welcome that Van Dyck received at Antwerp; and in it all the gracious Rubens joined.  But there was one face the returned traveler missed:  Isabella had died the year before.

The mere fact that a man has been away for several years studying his profession gives him a decided prestige when he returns.  Van Dyck, fresh from Italy, exuberant with life and energy, became at once the vogue.

He opened a studio, following the same lines that Rubens had, and several churches gave him orders for extensive altarpieces.

Antwerp prided herself on being an artistic center.  Buyers from England now and then appeared, and several of Rubens’ pictures had been taken to London to decorate the houses and halls of royalty.

Portrait-painting is the first form of art that appeals to a rude and uncultivated people.  To reproduce the image of a living man in stone, or to show a likeness of his face in paint, is calculated to give a thrill even to a savage.  There is something mysterious in the art, and the desire to catch the shadow ere the substance fades is strong in the human heart.  One reason that sacred art was so well encouraged in the Middle Ages was because the faces portrayed were reproductions of living men and women.  This lent an intense personal interest in the work, and insured its fostering care.  Callous indeed was the noble who would not pay good coin to have himself shown as Saint Paul, or his enemy as Judas.  In fact, “Judas Receiving the Thirty Pieces of Silver” was a very common subject, and the “Judas” shown was usually some politician who had given offense.

In Sixteen Hundred Twenty-eight, England had not yet developed an art-school of her own.  All her art was an importation, for although some fine pictures had been produced in England, they were all the work of foreigners—­men who had been brought over from the Continent.

Henry the Eighth had offered Raphael a princely sum if he would come to London and work for a single year.  Raphael, however, could not be spared from Italy to do work for “the barbarians,” and so he sent his pupil, Luca Penni.  Bluff old Hans Holbein also abode in England and drew a goodly pension from the State.

During the reign of Mary and her Spanish husband, Philip, several pictures by Titian arrived in London, via Madrid.  Then, too, there were various copies of pictures by Paul Veronese, Murillo and Velasquez that long passed for original, because the copyist had faithfully placed the great artist’s trademark in the proper place.

Queen Elizabeth held averages good by encouraging neither art nor matrimony—­whereas her father had set her the example of being a liberal patron of both.  If Elizabeth never discovered Shakespeare, how could she be expected to know Raphael?

About Sixteen Hundred Twenty, the year the “Mayflower” sailed, Paul Vensomer, Cornelis Jannsen and Daniel Mytens went over to England from the Netherlands and quickly made fortunes by painting portraits for the nobility.  This was the first of that peculiar rage for having a hall filled with ancestors.  The artists just named painted pictures of people long gone hence, simply from verbal descriptions, and warranted the likeness to give satisfaction.