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Updated: May 8, 2025
But what of the remainder of this insignificant composition with its toad and cows, its meaningless landscape? The Weenix swan is richer in paint texture. The Holbeins are two anyhow of splendid quality. Of the Rubenses it is better to defer mention until Antwerp is reached. They are of unequal value. The same may be said of the Van Dycks. Look at that baby girl standing by a chair.
I did really revisit the Pal-lavicini-Durazzo palace, and there revived the pleasure I had known before in its wonderful Van Dycks. Most wonderful was and will always be the "Boy in White," the little serene princeling, whoever he was, in whom the painter has fixed forever a bewitching mood and moment of childhood.
This visit is recorded because it made a profound impression upon a plastic mind. John had never sat in the seats of the mighty. Verney Boscobel was a delightful old house, but it might have been put, stables and all, into White Ladies, and never found again. Fluff showed John the famous Reynolds and Gainsborough portraits, the Van Dycks and Lelys, the Romneys and Richmonds.
Gregory in his father's dusty dismantled library. He and his were, it seemed, "ruined" as many people here already guessed. He looked at the full-length Van Dycks on the wall of the Tamworths' ballroom, and thought, not without a grim leap of humour, that he would be acting showman and auctioneer, within a few days perhaps, to his father's possessions of the same kind.
Corridors on whose floors one walked up and down hill; great chambers full of memories, and here and there indulging in a ghost. Tudor rooms with Holbeins between the windows, invisible to man; Jacobean rooms with Van Dycks, nearly as regrettably invisible; Lelys and Knellers, much more regrettably visible.
Since the death of the last Marquis of Breadalbane these travelled 'Van Dycks' have gone back to the English representative of the Rich family. Van Dyck had forty pounds for a half, and sixty pounds for a whole-length picture; for a large piece of the King, Queen, and their children, he had a hundred pounds. For the Wilton family picture he had five hundred and twenty-five pounds.
Through the Rich family many of these 'Van Dycks' passed to Taymouth Castle, where by a coincidence they were lodged in the company of numerous works of George Jamieson of Aberdeen, who is said to have been for a short time a fellow-pupil of Van Dyck's under Rubens, who has been called 'the Scotch Van Dyck, and who is certainly the first native painter who deserves honourable mention.
Pellew said: "Sunrise at eight," and Gwen said: "I think Masham will make it Sunday about two o'clock. We shan't have breakfast till eleven. You'll see!" They were in the great gallery with the Van Dycks when Gwen stopped, as one stops who thinks suddenly of an omission, and said, as to herself, more than to her hearers: "I wonder whether she meant me."
The Earl of Clarendon, in the next reign, had a great partiality for Van Dyck's pictures, and was said to be courted by gifts of them until his apartments at Cornbury were furnished with full-length 'Van Dycks. A third of his collection went to Kitty Hyde, Duchess of Queensberry, one of the Earl's three co-heiresses.
And go, presently, into the old city itself, dull-flaming with the scarlet, gold, and black, of the Belgian flag, and with something that seemed to radiate from the life itself of this hearty, happy people, after all their centuries of trade and war, and good food, and good art like their own Rubenses and Van Dycks. There was no business, not a ship moving in the Scheldt.
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