picture is a small 'Rape of Proserpine' (136). Out of thick woods on the right a rivulet flows in a little waterfall, and joins a larger brook in the foreground; this is the brook Cyanê; and, following the story as it is told in Ovid, we see how the nymph of the brook emerges from her waters to parley with the ravisher Pluto; she has her hand on the wheel of the golden chariot in which Pluto stands, his drapery flying in a crimson arch behind him, while he grasps his victim who struggles with outstretched arms, and at the same time drives with reins of scarlet and gold his plunging team of four-one of the team, the one relieved against the foaming stream, being coalblack, the other three black with white hoofs and muzzles. In the background is a dark level, and beyond the level a town and blue hills. The picture is exhibited as a Titian, and that Titian was commissioned to paint some such picture we know. There is a letter to the painter from Frederic Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, dated February 7, 1534, in which that friendly patron, speaking in behalf of his brother Ferrante, says:

My brother is very anxious to have two cabinet pictures by your hand to give away to friends in Spain. The commission will bring you honour, and I hope you will oblige him as soon as possible. He wants the subject of one to be a 'Rape of Proserpine,' a figure piece, you will understand; and more I need not say, as you know perfectly well what is wanted. If you love me, you will begin it quickly. And then follow instructions about a companion piece. Now here, at first sight, seems a text by which to identify beyond question the picture before us; and its golden tone and rich touch, the fiery action of the horses, the sweep and power of the foliage design, the poetry of the distance, the admirable conduct of the silvery lights upon the waterfall, the chariot wheel, the trident of the god, the resemblance of the face of Proserpine to that of the Victory in a picture painted by Titian about the same time, the Davalos allegory at the Louvre-all these things seem to justify the identification; though, if this is Titian, the figures certainly are not either in design or colour those of Titian at his best. However, further inquiry seems to yield positive evidence that this is not the work of the master at all, but of a Dutch scholar and imitator. In the Galerie du Palais Royal there is an engraving of the same subject reversed, and in the accompanying text the picture is ascribed to one Lambert Sustris or Suster. This Lambert Sustris was one of three artists whose careers and relations to one another we can but dimly gather. He is probably the same Lambert of Amsterdam whom Vasari mentions as having worked long under Titian, and caught skilfully the Italian manner; probably also he is the father of a certain Frederic (Federigo di Lamberto) who worked under Vasari himself, and afterwards crossed the Alps and became court painter and architect at Munich; as well as of a younger Lambert, known in Italy as Lamberto Tedesco, whose history we cannot follow. The question

is, can the picture before us be proved to be the same which was regarded, when it was in the Orleans Gallery, as the work of this obscure disciple of the great Venetian? The proof, so far as I know, is wanting, as no such picture occurs in the catalogue of those portions of the Orleans Gallery which were publicly sold in England. The probability remains, that it was among those previously sold by private contract, and is the same picture which Passavant found figuring as a Titian in the Coesvelt collection in 1833, and which he describes as a sketch full of fire and life.' When it was exhibited by Mr. Denison, afterwards Lord Ossington, at Manchester, it seems to have produced very different impressions upon different observers. Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle speak of it with contempt, as a characteristic work of copyists like Paolo Franceschi and Christopher Schwarz; W. Bürger, no insensitive judge, accepts it as an example of the splendid and ardent manner of the master himself. The latter description is nearer the truth, and the imitation, if imitation it is, astonishes by its excellence.

The ambiguous example from the school of Lionardo is that 'Female figure' (127), which stands, undraped except for a grey cloak thrown over her left arm and over the balustrade of the chair upon which she leans, before a rich background of foliage. The smiling head resembles many of Lionardo's design (see Grosvenor Gallery, 92); the dark golden hair is richly plaited, and the pose of the arms on the balustrade of the chair is almost exactly repeated from that of the famous portrait of Mona Lisa at the Louvre. The execution has great inequalities; the background of damson leaves and fruit being designed with a care and beauty which are quite worthy of the master himself, and which carry our thoughts to the 'Adam and Eve' extolled for its exquisite foliage by Vasari; while the body and arms are in some parts stiffly designed and poorly modelled enough. This may be in part the fault of restoration; but the same particular excellences and faults are repeated, in a picture representing precisely the same model only turned another way, and placed before another, an open, background, which passed with the rest of the Houghton Gallery into that of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. Both pictures belong to a fascinating group, in which the motives of Lionardo have been echoed with variations by one or another of his more immediate scholars, as Melzi or Salaï.

6

In the earlier Northern schools, it is clear that neither the 'Virgin and Child' from Clumber (217), nor Mr. Osmaston's Virgin and Child Enthroned,' are rightly named, though they are both very beautiful examples of the religious art of Flanders about the year 1520. But the great problem is the masterly double portrait of 'An Old Man and Woman,' ascribed to Quentin Matsys. The head of the woman, with its delicate modelling in pale clear tones, might possibly pass as the work of this master; but what of the man's

head beside it, painted in something like the strong tones of Holbein, and with the inexorable minuteness of Dürer in the imitation of every wrinkle on the arid countenance, every hair of the grey head (including one that has fallen loose upon the fur cloak), and all the stubble of a three days' beard? Who was it that could have combined, in this strongly grasped head, the qualities of the two greatest artists of Germany? Is it possible, as has been suggested, that Quentin Matsys might have done so at the time when he had been in close intercourse with Dürer at Antwerp? The question must stand unanswered. In the meantime there is a little work close by (214), upon which the monogram of. Dürer, though inserted in an unusual form among the ornaments of the dress, seems clearly attested by the handiwork; this is an admirable little head, somewhat injured, of a brown-skinned girl with a background line of sea, such as the master might quite well have painted during his stay in Venice.

Among the Italian pictures, besides those of which we have spoken, there are many doubtful, but one to which a somewhat special interest is well known to attach (193). At first sight, this simple little 'Madonna and Child,' with a gilt sky above a strip of landscape, does not seem to differ for the better from several other versions of the same composition, of which the original was probably by Perugino. Accordingly it has been at various times ascribed to one or another of the humbler masters of the Umbrian school. But its present owner has made good up to a certain point, on documentary evidence, its claim to be regarded as a possible early work of Raphael. It comes from the convent of St. Clare at Gubbio; visitors to the convent in the sixteenth century report that a certain ‘Madonna and Child' by Raphael was then in the possession of the sisters there; and this very picture carries a writing which can be plausibly interpreted as proving that it was bought by Elizabeth of Gubbio, sister to the Duke of Urbino, when she was Superior of the convent in Raphael's lifetime, and that it was there regarded as his work. Internal evidence neither distinctly confirms nor can be said distinctly to disprove this evidence of documents. There is some timidity and stiffness, with some charm and care, but little individual character, in the painting. We are on surer ground when we turn from this problematical work of a child destined to glory to the characteristic work of lesser men. Such we find in the highly finished little Pinturicchio (195), with the delicate gold touches that animate its lights, and its rich and inventive background; more conspicuously again in the noble altar-piece of Ghirlandaio (197), in which the sky and background only seem suspicious, and some figures with their draperies, especially the two children and the lovely angel in purple on the left, are perfectly pure and in the finest manner of the master. More beautiful still is the solemn Venetian altar-piece, formerly in the Wynn-Ellis collection (203), with the Virgin and Child between St. Peter and St. John the Baptist,

and two female martyrs whom by their attributes it is not easy to identify. This picture comes certainly from the studio of Bellini in his last days; it may contain some work of other hands than his, as of Sebastian del Piombo, about this time his pupil; and some of the hands are weakly drawn; but, excepting parts of the famous 'Feast of Bacchus' at Alnwick, there is scarcely anything more nobly characteristic of the later manner of the master than the two heads of martyrs.

At the opposite pole from all uncertainty is a little picture in the fifth gallery (325) which may easily escape notice, but which fills a place quite its own in the history of art. Tobias and the Angel move from the right across the foreground, in front of some dark foliage which fills the height of the picture on that side, Tobias dragging along the fish he has taken—a fish not indeed conceivably capable of devouring' him, but much larger than usual. At their feet are docks and scarlet flowers; where the wood opens, the country falls away, and beyond a dark middle distance we look away to a clear blue horizon. It is all finished with the utmost minuteness, is in its somewhat cold blue tones both strong and harmonious, and bears the marks of a blending of northern and southern ideals. Its painter is Adam Elsheimer; and there are connected with its history no less than three ruined lives. Elsheimer was a native of Frankfort, and went thence to Rome, where he lived in great repute for the ingenious fancy and precious finish of his paintings. But he worked so slowly that he could not earn a livelihood; and though he had an enthusiastic friend in a rich amateur from Holland, Count Henry of Goudt, who bought his pictures in advance, and engraved from them with much skill and patience, yet he could not keep his affairs in order, and finally died in a debtor's prison. Presently an ill fate overtook Count Henry himself. After his return to Utrecht he succumbed to the wiles, or, as some thought, to the love-potions, of an unworthy mistress, in whose house he spent his substance and at last ended his days in dotage. The only thing which would rouse him in these blighted latter years was talk about art, and especially about Elsheimer. Among other pictures of his friend he had engraved this of Tobias and the Angel. The engraving presently caught the fancy of one Hercules Seghers, a Dutch landscape-painter and etcher, much esteemed by Rembrandt though not by his contemporaries in general. Hercules Seghers etched upon copper a free copy of Goudt's engraving after this picture of Elsheimer, and his plate, after a very few impressions had been struck off, fell into the hands of Rembrandt, who altered it, scraping out the figures of Tobias and the Angel, and putting in their place the Holy Family on their flight into Egypt. And ever since, this etching, with Rembrandt's alterations, has been known as the Flight into Egypt' of Rembrandt. Meantime Hercules Seghers himself ended a life of hopeless poverty by a drunkard's

:

death and so concludes the series of tragedies of which this dainty little work reminds us.

But if we are ever to get to the drawings we must close these desultory studies among the pictures. We must pass over Rubens and Vandyck, though they are both well represented; and the Dutchmen, though the portraits of Franz Hals and Van der Helst are. masterpieces, and though there are jewels of Ruysdael and Hobbema, Metsu and Jan Steen, Van der Velde, Van der Heyde, and Karel du Jardin. And we must say nothing about the Englishmen, though Hogarth, Reynolds, and Romney are all three at their best, and though the pictures of Stubbs, Wheatley, and James Ward offer examples, of a kind not commonly occurring, and of which there is much to be said, of the excellence attainable by a homebred art. devoted to the sports and pastimes of English squires.

III.

Between the two exhibitions of drawings, four at least of the great masters of the world, Lionardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Rembrandt, are represented with fifty examples each or more. Of Lionardo we gain a different view from that which we gained from the famous series of the Windsor heads and landscapes exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery last year. There are a few studies only of heads; there are one or two enigmatic or allegorical compositions not easy to interpret; there are two cartoons of the master for Holy Families, one of them the very consummation of his art; and there is a series of his studies for the monument of Francesco Sforza, with examples of other studies in anatomy, in engineering, hydraulics, military appliances, and the thousand practical or impracticable crafts and mysteries which occupied his genius, the genius of pursuit and experiment incarnate, the brain which, as Vasari says, never was satisfied or took rest from puzzling-(che quel cervello mai restava di ghiribizzare). The most interesting single head is, perhaps, the cartoon portrait in the Grosvenor Gallery from Christ Church,Oxford (92), showing the soft, feminine, and thoughtful face of a man with full lips and long hair, whom we should scarcely distinguish, except by his cloak and cap, from a woman. The corresponding head (95) of a stern and aquiline warrior in three-quarters view, is of a grand character and modelling, but might be by a pupil as well as by the master. In the same gallery and from the same source, we find the fascinating allegorical sketch (91) which shows the personages of Fortitude and Prudence, according to their usual types and attributes, but thrown into a state of commotion by some strange assault; they are stationed by what seems an altar, and on this crouches a bird, which Prudence protects with one hand, while with the other she strikes against the assailants; these are hounds,