Isabel Anderson

IN the Low Countries, perhaps more than in any other part of Europe, has the many-sided life of the people revealed itself through the various forms of artistic expression. Religion, industry, struggles for independence, the power of the guilds, the splendour of the dukes of Burgundy, the landscape, the homes, the people themselves, all are found in Belgian art. They were pictured in the delicate tracery of cloistered illuminators, carved in wood or stone in the old churches, enshrined within the wooden panels of ancient triptychs, and woven into the storied tapestries of hall and castle. They figured in the canvases of the Renaissance masters, and after the “Dark Ages” of the Spanish oppression, were revived in a new race of modern painters, who depicted the life of the young nation. The true greatness, the real charm of Belgium has lain in her art.

Obviously, the two great periods of Belgian art were the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, but it by no means follows that no other periods are worthy of our consideration; indeed, we cannot understand the school of the van Eycks without studying the three centuries preceding the fifteenth. Before the days of Hubert van Eyck there were at Bruges masters of whom he learned, and whose style can hardly be distinguished from his own. A hundred years earlier than the van Eycks was the great age of architecture, when cathedrals and mighty cloth-halls rose on Flemish plains, and sculpture, stained glass and wrought iron were all called for to decorate the wonderful structures. Still earlier, many a patient monk in his cell traced with loving care those illuminations that made the beauty of missal and breviary. The van Eycks and Memling were the lineal descendants of these artists.

Toward the fourteenth century, the exquisite vignettes of the illuminators displayed marvelous grace and delicacy of execution, cleverness of design, and great brilliancy of colour. To quote from a French writer, “In the hands of the miniature painters of Bruges, gold glistens, it sparkles. Their colours, if they are not more beautiful, are as beautiful as those of nature. Their flesh tints vie with the freshness of colour of young girls, just as in their arabesques and in their frames we think we see currants and strawberries ripening and breathe the perfume of flowers.”

At this time, painters and illuminators were in some sense rivals. They were enrolled in separate guilds at Bruges. “The Guild of St. Luke included painters, saddlers, glass-makers and mirror-makers; that of St. John illuminators, calligraphers, binders and image-painters.” Painters were allowed to use oil-colours, but illuminators were limited to water-colours. It became the aim of the former to transfer to their canvases and their wooden panels the same vividness of colouring that the latter produced upon vellum. Doubtless many artists were at work at this problem, which was finally solved by Hubert van Eyck.

Another important factor in forming the Flemish school was the influence of the guilds. In the fourteenth century, the painter was a craftsman and as rigidly bound by the laws of his guild as any carpenter or mason. He was apprenticed to a master for perhaps five years, during which he was taught the secrets of the craft. He learned to choose the wood for his panel and make it ready for use. He mixed the fine plaster with which to cover the wood, and the durability of his picture depended on the care he used in this and the evenness of the coating. For every implement with which he worked, every colour that entered into his picture, he must depend upon himself. He must prepare his own oils and varnishes. If he wished to make a drawing, he often was obliged to work with the silver-point, and to prepare his paper himself; if he drew in chalk or charcoal, he had to make his own selection of materials.

After the apprenticeship came the years of wandering, when the young painter could work for any master he pleased, could travel as far afield as he chose, and in this way gain experience and a store of valuable impressions. When he returned to his home, he was admitted to the painters’ guild, provided he could satisfy its officers that he was competent; if so, he could take his position as a master of the craft. Even then he was not free from the supervision of the fraternity. His master’s oath bound him to honesty and to do his work “as in the sight of God.” Its officers inspected his materials and his output, and if either was found to be below the standard he was punished. Every contract must be fulfilled to the letter, and the guild officers were the arbiters in case of any dispute. Finally, all his implements were marked with the sign of the guild.

Pictures of the cities of Flanders in the fifteenth century bear witness to their artistic splendour. Says an English writer of Bruges at that time, “The squares were adorned with fountains; its bridges with statues in bronze; the public buildings and many of the private houses with statuary and carved work, the beauty of which was heightened and brought out by gilding and polychrome; the windows were rich with storied glass, and the walls of the interiors adorned with paintings in distemper, or hung with gorgeous tapestry.” It was in surroundings such as these and under the stimulus of competition with his brother craftsmen that Hubert van Eyck made his great discovery of a manner of using oil in painting large pieces that would make it possible to equal the brilliant colours of the illuminators. The Flemings kept the secret of the new process so well that it was not disclosed to Italian artists until toward the end of the fifteenth century.

But this discovery in technique is not his only claim to renown. His achievements as a painter were even greater than his skill as a craftsman. A high authority says that the beauty of the Virgin in the Adoration of the Lamb “places it in the rank of the Madonnas of Leonardo da Vinci and of Raphael.” This genius of the Middle Ages and his younger brother have left Belgium in the famous triptych a lofty composition in which the marvelous technique that has wrought the colours together till the surface is like enamel is combined with beauty of landscape and skill in portraiture. In the inscription placed upon it we read: “Hubert van Eyck, than whom none greater has appeared, began the work, which Jan his brother, in art the second, brought to completion.”

Almost nothing is known of the life of Hubert van Eyck. He was born at Maaseyck about the year 1366, and lived at Bruges with his brother and their sister Margaret, who was also a painter. He was made a member of the painters’ guild of Ghent in 1421, the year in which he left the service of the powerful lord afterward known as Philip the Good. Three years later, Jodocus Vydts, burgomaster of Ghent, and his wife Isabella gave him an order for an altar-piece to be placed in their mortuary chapel in the cathedral. His work was cut short by his death in 1426. It is impossible to tell how much was done by his hand and how much by his brother Jan, but there seems good reason to believe that Hubert painted the central panels in the upper row, and that Jan was the artist of the Adoration panel below these. Through some strange lack of appreciation in the custodians of this masterpiece, Brussels and Berlin were able to purchase the wings, so that those we saw at Ghent were only copies.

Hubert van Eyck’s body was laid in the chapel of the Vydts’ in the cathedral of St. Bavon, near his masterpiece, but we are told that his severed right arm was placed in a reliquary in the cathedral itself. No doubt it was considered a sacred relic! His epitaph was carved on a shield, supported by a marble skeleton. The following free translation of this quaint old Flemish verse was made by William B. Scott:[6]

"L'HOMME À L'ŒUILLET."—VAN EYCK.

Jan van Eyck was courtier as well as artist. As a young man, he was employed by John of Bavaria, Bishop of LiÈge, and after the death of his brother we hear of him as gentleman of the chamber to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, by whom he was sent on various missions. One of his journeys was made to Portugal, where he painted the portrait of Princess Isabella, who afterward became the second wife of the Duke, and in whose honour the Order of the Golden Fleece was founded. His famous picture called “L’homme À l’oeuillet,” was the portrait of Jean de Roubaix, who accompanied him to Portugal and arranged the marriage of the Princess with the great Duke. Jan seems to have possessed the modesty of true greatness, for on more than one of his pictures is found the motto, “Als Ikh Kan,” As I can. During the latter part of his life he lived at Bruges, where he died in 1440.

In the midst of his court duties, Jan found time to go on with the great altar-piece, which he completed in 1432. A few years later, he produced what is perhaps his finest religious painting next to the Adoration, the Madonna of the Canon van der Paele. This picture represents the Virgin and Child enthroned in a stately basilica, probably the cathedral of St. Donatian at Bruges. In the foreground, on the right stands St. George, on the left St. Donatian. On the Virgin’s left, upon his knees, is George van der Paele, Canon of St. Donatian, the donor of the painting.

This Virgin and St. Donatian by Jan van Eyck would make one think, says Fromentin, “that the art of painting had said its last word, and that from the first hour. And yet, without changing either theme or method, Memling was going to say something more.”

A tradition cherished by the Flemings has it that Hans Memling, in the year 1477, dragged himself, sick and needy, to the gates of St. John’s Hospital in Bruges, where he was tenderly nursed back to health, and that, in gratitude, he painted for the hospital the pictures that have ever since been its pride. This may or may not be true, but a detail in the Marriage of St. Catherine seems designed to confirm the legend. It represents a man dropping exhausted in the street, who is then revived by some cooling drink, and afterward borne to the hospital. We can not but feel that the artist is giving us here an incident from his personal history.

The little we know of Memling’s life may be told in very few words. In 1450, he painted the portrait of Isabella, Duchess of Burgundy, whose likeness Jan van Eyck had journeyed to Portugal to make twenty-two years before. After the death of Philip the Good, no doubt he was court painter to Charles the Rash and in the year of the latter’s defeat and death at Nancy took refuge in Bruges. Here he married and came into possession of some property through his wife, he painted his greatest works, and died in 1495.

In the quaint chapter-room of the old hospital, itself dating from the thirteenth century, Memling’s compositions found an appropriate setting. Here was the great triptych of the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, an altar-piece for the high altar of the church connected with the hospital; two smaller triptychs, one of the Three Kings, the other a PietÀ; the portrait of Mary Moreel, and a diptych ordered by Martin van Nieuwenhoven, on which is Memling’s finest piece of portraiture, the likeness of the donor. “The man himself is no very superb specimen of humanity; he has a bright and pleasant though rather foolish face; but such as he is Memling has caught the idea of him, and placed him visibly and knowably on the panel.... Its colouring is unusual and most beautiful. The textures of the garments are superb, and not only are the little landscapes seen through the open windows full of the charm that Memling always threw into his backgrounds, but the charm extends to the interior of the room, with its stained glass windows, paneled walls, looking-glass and other pieces of furniture.”[7]

But the most interesting work by the great Fleming that the hospital contains is the world-famed reliquary of St. Ursula. This chest, in shape like a tiny Gothic chapel, only three feet long and two feet ten inches high, bears on its sides in six arched panels the legend of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins. The saint and her maidens are seen landing at Cologne, arriving at Basle, and received in Rome by the Sovereign Pontiff himself, who joins them for the return voyage down the Rhine. They are awaited at Cologne by the cruel Huns, who shoot them down without mercy, and, last of all, the saintly princess suffers martyrdom.

This story is told in panels only one foot in width. The little pictures are crowded with figures dressed in the sumptuous costumes of the Court of Burgundy. Genuine landscapes are introduced in the backgrounds—the city of Cologne and the scenery along the Rhine are pictured from sketches which the artist made himself. These tiny paintings have the brilliant colouring of the van Eycks and the finish of detail of the old illuminators. They show the tenderness, the fancy, the patient industry of the master. “Gentle, cordial, affectionate, humble, painstaking as Memling must have been, his best works are those of the St. Ursula series type, where his fancy could play about bright and fairy-like creatures, where no storm nor the memory of a storm need ever come, where no clouds darkened the sky, and not even the brilliant tones of sunset gave forecast of a coming night.”[8]

Another of the early Flemish masters was Roger van der Weyden. His St. Luke Painting the Madonna, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is considered one of the masterpieces of that gallery.

As an artist, Roger van der Weyden was the equal of neither the van Eycks nor Memling, but he was greater as a master. His art combined the religious symbolism of the Middle Ages with the new naturalism of Jan van Eyck, and its effect was wide-spread. The Germans made his paintings their standard, the Italians acknowledged his greatness, and the artists of the Low Countries all formed their style under his teaching or strove to imitate his work.

I have never seen a keener and juster analysis of the art of the Flemish primitives than that given by Conway, in his “Early Flemish Artists,” from which I quote: “Jan van Eyck was a man of fact, his work is an attempt to state the uttermost truth about things.... In his pictures, light and shade, texture, colour and outline have about equal stress laid upon them. In this respect he was one of the most complete of artists.“ Roger van der Weyden ”laid chief stress upon outlines, striving to make them graceful so far as in him lay.... Memling was formed of milder stuff.... He was a painter of fairy tales, not of facts.... To lose oneself in a picture of his is to take a pleasant and healthy rest.”

The same critic adds this beautiful characterization of early Flemish art in general: “The paintings of Flanders were not, and were not intended to be, popular. Flemish artists did not, like the Italians, paint for the folk, but for the delight of a small clique of cultured and solid individuals. They painted as their employers worked, with energy, honesty and endurance; they cared not for beauty of the more palpable and less enduring kind, but they cared infinitely for Truth; for her they laboured in humility, satisfied with the joy of their own obedience, and then, when they slept and knew not of it, she came and clothed the children of their industry with her own unfading garments of loveliness and life.”

Between the glorious past of the van Eycks and Memling and the brilliant future of Rubens and Jordaens, stands Quentin Matsys, the founder of the Antwerp school, who died in 1530. He was the great master of the Gothic-Renaissance transition, showing the influence of the Renaissance, while still clinging to Gothic types. His paintings include religious subjects and incidents drawn from daily life. His “women of a goddess-like delicacy with almond eyes and long slim fingers,” lived a mystical life among transparent, glassy columns and carpets with exotic embroideries. The men have an air of distinction. He often leans as far toward caricature, however, as he does toward sentimentality, and there are great contrasts in his work—grimacing, long-nosed, carousing old men and lovely women. “None understands as well as Matsys how to make strong splendours of colour shine through a thin veil of mist, or how to paint the tremulous surface of life so that we see the blood running in the veins.”

From “Master Quentin’s” prime until Rubens brought back to Flanders the results of his studies in Italy was nearly one hundred years—years that covered the Spanish oppression of the Low Countries under Charles V and Philip II, years that saw Flanders desolated by the Duke of Alva. But out of the decay of Flemish art rose Peter Paul Rubens, born in 1577.

John Rubens, the father of the painter, was a lawyer in Antwerp. As he favoured the Protestants, he found it the safest course, when the Duke of Alva’s reign of terror began, to take refuge with his family across the border at Cologne. Here he became the legal adviser of Anne of Saxony, wife of William the Silent, who preferred to reside comfortably at Cologne while he was off fighting the Spaniards.

The result of this association was a scandal of the most serious nature, and only the efforts of his forgiving wife and the desire of the house of Orange to hush up the affair, saved Master Rubens from the penalty of death, as prescribed by the German law of that day. His sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life, but after two years of close confinement he was permitted to live with his family in Siegen, on condition of giving himself up again whenever summoned. It was during this time that Peter Paul, “the most Flemish of all the Flemings,” was born at Siegen, on German soil.

After the death of John Rubens, his widow returned with her family to Antwerp, where the little Peter Paul was sent to a school on the site of the present Milk Market, until he was thirteen years old. Then, as he was a bright, handsome boy, the Countess van Lalaing received him as page into her house, where she held a miniature court. He was in the service of the Countess only one year, but the training he gained in that time gave him the courtesy and ease of manners that made him, in after years, perfectly at home in the presence of princes.

In his boyhood Rubens had shown his love of art by making it his chief amusement to copy the illustrations in his mother’s large family Bible, and after leaving the Countess van Lalaing, he persuaded his mother to let him study painting. For four years he was the pupil of Adam van Noort, and afterward of Otto van Veen, also called Vaenius, after the fashion of the day. At that time van Veen was the most noted painter in Antwerp. Two years more of study, and Rubens was admitted into the Guild of St. Luke, and the following year he assisted his master in decorating the city for the Joyous Entry of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella.

The young painter’s next step was to seek inspiration in Italy, and in 1600 he went to Venice to study Titian and Veronese. Here he copied old masters, painted portraits, and attracted the attention of the Duke of Mantua, who became his patron. In 1603 he was sent to Spain by the Duke, and took with him many paintings as a present for Philip III. When he went home to Flanders in 1608, Albert and Isabella made him court painter in order that they might keep him in Antwerp.

Rubens was twice married. His first wife, Isabella Brant, made his home happy for seventeen years, and is commemorated in several paintings. Helena Fourment, whom he married four years after Isabella’s death, was a girl of sixteen who was considered remarkably beautiful, and if we may judge by the use he made of her as a model, this opinion of her was fully shared by her husband. Besides the numerous portraits of her—in every possible position, sitting, standing or walking, handsomely dressed or nearly nude, alone or with her husband or children, in her own person or as Bathsheba, Dido or Andromeda—she appears in such large compositions as the Garden of Love and the Judgment of Paris.

The paintings of Rubens have always been the special pride of Antwerp. The Elevation of the Cross and the Descent from the Cross were the treasures of the cathedral. The first was painted in 1610, soon after his return from Italy, and the second but little later. There are six known variants of the Descent from the Cross. The one in the cathedral is a wonderful composition, brilliant in its conception and marvelously drawn. The Elevation is by some critics considered finer than its companion picture. The Christ À la Paille, the “Coup de Lance,” the Adoration of the Kings, and the Last Communion of St. Francis are all in the Antwerp Museum.

Fromentin, writing of Rubens in 1876, thus spoke of Malines and works of the great artist that were treasured there: “There are only two things that have outlived its past splendour, some extremely costly sanctuaries and the pictures by Rubens. These pictures are the celebrated triptych of the Magi, in St. John’s, and the no less celebrated triptych of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, which belongs to the Church of Notre Dame.”

In this connection it is interesting to read how, when the Germans were shelling Malines for the second time, early last September, a Red Cross worker saved the Adoration of the Magi. The church had not yet suffered from the German shells. “This large work, composed of two side panels and a center piece, being on panel, was too heavy for two men to handle. I was first compelled to break into the church, for everybody had fled from the stricken town, and after many endeavours to find help, commandeered the only police officer available, two fine gendarmes and a locksmith. These men, with the utmost good will, helped us to rig a tackle over the famous picture, and, after two or three hours’ work, we were rejoiced to see our exertions crowned with success, for the three parts of the picture were down, without the slightest scratch. We commandeered from a village close by a dray and two horses, lashed the central piece of the picture between soft pads of hay and blankets, and sent it under the care of one of our men into safety at ——. The two side panels I took away myself in my own car.”

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, which had been removed from the church of Notre Dame, and was found in a corridor of a public gymnasium, lying bare against the wall and without any protection whatever, was saved in the same way. The shrine of St. Rombaut, “a very costly work of silver and gold, about three feet high and five feet long,” was rescued before the destruction of the cathedral, and sent to a secret place of safety. It is a “valuable specimen of antique goldsmith’s work.” Many altar furnishings in gold and silver, beautiful laces, and a number of paintings, among them two more that are attributed to Rubens, were also included among the articles saved.

Rubens was a prolific artist, and his pictures are to be found in all the great galleries of Europe, besides a small number in American private houses and museums. An interesting example of these is the portrait of a man and his wife, in the collection of Mrs. Robert D. Evans of Boston, now in the Museum of Fine Arts.

Rubens had all the industry, honesty, and brilliancy of colour of the great Flemings. He had, besides, greatness of conception and breadth of composition. A distinguished English painter calls him “perhaps the greatest master in the mechanical part of the art, the best workman with his tools, that ever exercised a pencil.” His paintings glow with vitality; they depict natural life in landscapes, in animals, in human beings. Many of his works are on large canvases and depict gross and sensual subjects. His Madonnas are often unsatisfying; his figures of Christ seldom bear the impress of the Godhead; with one or two notable exceptions the life of the spirit is lacking in his work. One of these exceptions is the Last Communion of St. Francis, which was at last accounts in the Antwerp Museum. The dying saint in the foreground has raised himself on his knees, and is even stretching toward the officiating priest on the left. His weak body is supported by a monk on the right. His face is radiant with spiritual exaltation and an earnestness of purpose that would hold even death in check until the holy wafer has passed his lips. In this picture Rubens has pierced the veil and revealed the things that cannot be known by the senses. Fromentin says of it: “When one has made a prolonged study of this unequalled work in which Rubens is transfigured, one can no longer look at anything, neither any person, nor other paintings, not even Rubens himself; for today one must leave the Museum.”

But Rubens was the head of a school of painting—the later Flemish school. His studio was thronged with young artists, who were assistants as well as students. With his keenness of observation directed to a line of business, the master quickly discovered what each pupil could do best, and set him at that part of a composition. In this way Rubens was enabled to produce the immense number of pictures that bear his name—thirteen hundred have been catalogued. One student would paint nothing but landscapes, another all the animals, while the teacher put in the most important parts and added the finishing touches to the whole. There was no deceit in this method of working, for the amount of Rubens’ own work a given piece contained depended upon the price his clients were willing to pay. The design was always his, but those who paid the lowest price got nothing but the design from his hand, while his wealthy patrons who could afford the maximum received pieces that were entirely his own handiwork, and between the two extremes there were all grades of collaboration.

Jacob Jordaens was one of the most famous of Rubens’ pupils. It is said that “they are of the same family and the same temperament; and Rubens stands between Jordaens and van Dyck. Rubens is gold, van Dyck silver, and Jordaens blood and fire.” The latter was an indefatigable painter and a rapid worker, often completing a portrait at a single sitting. He covered a wide range of subjects, religious, allegorical, landscapes, portraits and animals, and he succeeded so well that “there are Jordaens attributed to Rubens and Rubens to Jordaens.”

Anthony van Dyck was another pupil of the great master, and the aristocrat of the famous seventeenth century Flemings. He was only a boy among boys, quite undistinguished, until one day chancing to rub against a painting of his teacher’s on which the paint was still wet, he retouched it so skilfully that it turned out better than before. In time he became so formidable a rival, in spite of his youth, that Rubens sent him off to Italy to study. He came back in four years, greater than ever. A few years later, Rubens contrived to have him called to England as court painter. During the time that he remained in Flanders he produced several religious pictures, among them the Raising of the Cross, at Courtrai, and a Crucifixion, which, before the war, was in the Cardinal’s palace at Malines. The same Red Cross worker who rescued the Rubens from destruction at Malines also brought away this composition, of which he says, that it had been cut out of its frame the day before, rolled up, and stowed away in the cellar. But van Dyck’s best work was done in portraiture, and in this he was “nearly the equal of Titian.”

Van Dyck so quickly became a great favourite of Charles I that he was knighted within three months after going to England. He painted the King and Queen many times. The portrait of Charles I in the Louvre was done at the height of his skill. He loved to paint kings and nobles, in velvet and silken garments trimmed with rare old lace. For ten years he was court painter in England, and so many of his portraits are still in the great houses there that a family portrait by van Dyck is said to be “tantamount in England to a patent of nobility.” After the execution of Charles, he went to Flanders and to Paris seeking commissions, but his popularity had waned, and he returned to England broken in health and spirit, and died there in 1641. His body rests in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Van Dyck painted cavaliers, and he himself belonged to that type. His work is so individual that it is easily recognized. A charming adventurer, a popular courtier, he was a favourite of kings, was fÊted in foreign countries. At the close of his life, he is called “a man in ruins, who until his last hour has the good fortune, and this is the most extraordinary thing about him, to preserve his greatness when he paints.”

The annals of the seventeenth century are filled with the names of a host of artists of more or less renown, followers of Rubens and van Dyck. But “for the Flemish school, the eighteenth century is a long entr’acte, during which the stage, so nobly occupied of old, is sad and deserted.”

The modern Belgian school of art started in Antwerp after the Revolution of 1830. At first it corresponded to the romantic movement in France, of which Delaroche was one of the leaders, but with this difference, that the Belgians chose their subjects for the most part from the age-long battle for freedom waged by their country. The most distinguished of these “romantic” Belgian artists were Louis Galliat and Edouard Biefve.

The “historic” and “archaic” schools of these modern painters included Leys and his followers, whose work is interesting because they sought to reproduce the characteristics of van Eyck and Memling. The frescos in the Antwerp town hall by Leys, illustrating the charters and the privileges of that city in olden times, are called by Max Rooses, “monumental creations by a great master of the art of painting.” Henri de Braekeleer had the art of investing the most prosaic subjects with interest. He painted the ordinary things of daily life, a wine-shop, an old man at his printing, in a way that glorified them.

The insane artist, Wiertz, thought himself the second Rubens, and produced a number of huge canvases. The Wiertz Museum had an astonishing collection of the works of this artist—paintings on every imaginable theme, ranging from “wild nightmares of the brain” to such impressive compositions as the Contest for the Body of Patroclus, after the manner of Rubens, and the Triumph of Christ, a sublime work showing great originality and wonderful power of execution.

Much remarkably good restoration of paintings has been done by modern Belgian artists. An amusing story has come to me of an artist who was employed to touch up a large painting in an old church. When he presented his bill the committee in charge refused payment unless the details were specified. Whereupon he presented the items as follows:

Belgium has lost none of her interest in artistic expression. At the Academy in Antwerp, there were about two thousand art students before the war, and about sixteen thousand in all Belgium. Perhaps the most noted living painters at that time were Stevens and Wauters, and Madame Ronner, who was famous for her pictures of cats. The studio of Blanc-Grin, in Brussels, was the center of present-day painters when we were there.

Belgium has never been so famous for its sculptors as for its painters. Among the moderns, Jef Lambeaux took high rank, but Constantin Meunier, of LiÈge, was perhaps the greatest. “He was par excellence,” says Max Rooses, “the sculptor of the workman: first of the Hainault coal-miner, then of the worker of all trades and countries.... He finally arrived at investing his models with truly classic beauty. They became the heroes of a grand drama, now commanding the flames of tall furnaces and measuring their strength with the most terrible of the elements, now cutting the corn and tying it in sheaves, defying the almost equally murderous heat of the sun.”

In a notice of the Royal Academy Exhibition in London, in May of the present year, we read, “Almost the only work universally praised in the press reviews of the opening day is by a Belgian sculptor, Egide Rombeaux. It is a statue of more than life size, entitled ’Premier Morning.’” One critic says, that outside the charmed circle where Rodin reigns supreme, no sculpture more remarkable in originality and poetry of conception has been seen of late years in a public exhibition. Belgian art has not lost its vitality. Will it not emerge from its baptism of fire with the consecration of a noble purpose to express the honour, the patriotism, the self-sacrifice, that have glorified the land?