LEO BELGICUS.--Perhaps you will say after this I am a prejudiced critic.I see the pictures in the cathedral fuming under the rudeness of that beadle, or at the lawful hours and prices, pestered by a swarm of shabby touters, who come behind me chattering in bad English, and who would have me see the sights through their mean, greedy eyes.Better see Rubens any where than in a church.At the Academy, for example, where you may study him at your leisure.But at church?--I would as soon ask Alexandre Dumas for a sermon.
Either would paint you a martyrdom very fiercely and picturesquely--writhing muscles, flaming coals, scowling captains and executioners, swarming groups, and light, shade, color most dexterously brilliant or dark; but in Rubens I am admiring the performer rather than the piece.With what astonishing rapidity he travels over his canvas;how tellingly the cool lights and warm shadows are made to contrast and relieve each other; how that blazing, blowsy penitent in yellow satin and glittering hair carries down the stream of light across the picture! This is the way to work, my boys, and earn a hundred florins a day.See! I am as sure of my line as a skater of making his figure of eight! and down with a sweep goes a brawny arm or a flowing curl of drapery.The figures arrange themselves as if by magic.The paint-pots are exhausted in furnishing brown shadows.
The pupils look wondering on, as the master careers over the canvas.
Isabel or Helena, wife No.1 or No.2, are sitting by, buxom, exuberant, ready to be painted; and the children are boxing in the corner, waiting till they are wanted to figure as cherubs in the picture.Grave burghers and gentlefolks come in on a visit.There are oysters and Rhenish always ready on yonder table.Was there ever such a painter? He has been an ambassador, an actual Excellency, and what better man could be chosen? He speaks all the languages.He earns a hundred florins a day.Prodigious! Thirty-six thousand five hundred florins a year.Enormous! He rides out to his castle with a score of gentlemen after him, like the Governor.That is his own portrait as St.George.You know he is an English knight? Those are his two wives as the two Maries.He chooses the handsomest wives.He rides the handsomest horses.He paints the handsomest pictures.He gets the handsomest prices for them.That slim young Van Dyck, who was his pupil, has genius too, and is painting all the noble ladies in England, and turning the heads of some of them.And Jordaens--what a droll dog and clever fellow! Have you seen his fat Silenus? The master himself could not paint better.And his altar-piece at St.Bavon's? He can paint you anything, that Jordaens can--a drunken jollification of boors and doxies, or a martyr howling with half his skin off.What a knowledge of anatomy! But there is nothing like the master--nothing.He can paint you his thirty-six thousand five hundred florins' worth a year.Have you heard of what he has done for the French Court? Prodigious! I can't look at Rubens's pictures without fancying I see that handsome figure swaggering before the canvas.And Hans Hemmelinck at Bruges? Have you never seen that dear old hospital of St.John, on passing the gate of which you enter into the fifteenth century? I see the wounded soldier still lingering in the house, and tended by the kind gray sisters.His little panel on its easel is placed at the light.He covers his board with the most wondrous, beautiful little figures, in robes as bright as rubies and amethysts.I think he must have a magic glass, in which he catches the reflection of little cherubs with many-colored wings, very little and bright.Angels, in long crisp robes of white, surrounded with halos of gold, come and flutter across the mirror, and he draws them.He hears mass every day.He fasts through Lent.No monk is more austere and holy than Hans.Which do you love best to behold, the lamb or the lion? the eagle rushing through the storm, and pouncing mayhap on carrion; or the linnet warbling on the spray?
By much the most delightful of the Christopher set of Rubens to my mind (and ego is introduced on these occasions, so that the opinion may pass only for my own, at the reader's humble service to be received or declined,) is the "Presentation in the Temple:" splendid in color, in sentiment sweet and tender, finely conveying the story.
To be sure, all the others tell their tale unmistakably--witness that coarse "Salutation," that magnificent "Adoration of the Kings"(at the Museum), by the same strong downright hands; that wonderful "Communion of St.Francis," which, I think, gives the key to the artist's faire better than any of his performances.I have passed hours before that picture in my time, trying and sometimes fancying I could understand by what masses and contrasts the artist arrived at his effect.In many others of the pictures parts of his method are painfully obvious, and you see how grief and agony are produced by blue lips, and eyes rolling blood shot with dabs of vermilion.
There is something simple in the practice.Contort the eyebrow sufficiently, and place the eyeball near it,--by a few lines you have anger or fierceness depicted.Give me a mouth with no special expression, and pop a dab of carmine at each extremity--and there are the lips smiling.This is art if you will, but a very naive kind of art: and now you know the trick, don't you see how easy it is?
TU QUOQUE.--Now you know the trick, suppose you take a canvas and see whether YOU can do it? There are brushes, palettes, and gallipots full of paint and varnish.Have you tried, my dear sir--you who set up to be a connoisseur? Have you tried? I have--and many a day.And the end of the day's labor? O dismal conclusion!
