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The Vandyck commanded the staircase, attracting immediate attention, as it faced the principal entry. In the wide space between the two great windows were two portraits of equal size; the famous Sir Peter Crewys, by Lely, painted to resemble, as nearly as possible, his royal master, in dress and attitude; and his brother Timothy, by Kneller.
I confess that I derived a morbid and exquisite pleasure in doing so: it was so characteristic in her, so appropriate to the house! It completed her personality so perfectly, and made it so much easier to conceive a way of painting her. Oke standing by the cabinet in the yellow room, in the white Vandyck dress copied from the portrait of her ancestress. Mr. Oke might resent it, Mrs.
Her eyes wandered towards the head of the table, where George was talking why! actually talking earnestly, and as though he were enjoying himself, to Lady Maxwell, whose noble head and neck, rising from a silver white dress, challenged a great Genoese Vandyck of a Marehesa Balbi which was hanging just behind her, and challenged it victoriously.
Sofonisba became blind in her old age, but lost no other faculty. Vandyck was her guest when at Genoa, and said that he had learned more of his art from one blind old woman than from any other teacher. A medal was struck in her honor at Bologna. The Academy of Fine Arts at Edinburgh contains a noble picture by Vandyck, painted in his Italian manner.
A fine Vandyck, 1979, Head of an Old Man; Rubens' portrait of Marie de' Medici, 2109; and a sketch in oils, 2122, Elevation of the Cross, are in Room XXXV. We return to the Salle Vandyck and the Grande Galerie, along which we retrace our steps and enter, at its further end, the where an assortment of masterpieces is hung from the various schools we have visited.
Before the days of Charles I. the English kings were much in the habit of inviting foreign artists to England, and commissions were given to them. The painters who were most prominent in England were of the Flemish school, and even under Charles I., as we have seen, Rubens and Vandyck were the principal painters in England.
For either they have been carried away, like the magnificent group of the Lommellini family to Edinburgh, the Marchesa Brignole with her child to England, or they have been repainted and spoiled. It was in 1621, on the 3rd October, that Vandyck, mounted on "the best horse in Rubens' stables," set out from Antwerp for Italy.
A careless but not ungrateful monarch, rejoicing doubtless to see his faithful soldier and servant so well provided for, bestowed on him a baronetcy, a portrait by Vandyck of the late king, his father, and the promise of a handsome sum of money, for the payment of which the new baronet forebore to press his royal patron.
It was the room so familiar to his childhood and youth, with the family pictures, the Gainsborough full-length of his very plain great-grandmother in white satin at the end, two or three Vandyck school-portraits of seventeenth-century Mannerings, and the beautiful Hogarth head their best possession that was so like Pamela.
The transitions are wonderful, and do not appear to be guided by any rule. Those of the gentlemen are simply absurd. Since the days of Vandyck, there has been nothing attractive in their dress; nothing picturesque. It has been as ugly as possible, and continues to be so.
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