out of his borrowings Broederlam has developed something quite new. No Italian of his day could have taught him this relation of figure to landscape, or the particularized naturalism of the forms, nor the genre sentiment of a figure like that of Joseph in the Flight into Egypt. For this landscape, with its conical, spirally-twisted hills, and its clumps of trees with interlacing stems in relief on dark shadow, is one which not only dominates the art of French miniaturists for the next twenty years, and leads directly to the culminating work of the de Limbourgs, but is the first example of a type which we find later on in all the early naturalists of North Italy-in Gentile da Fabriano, in Stefano da Zevio, in an exaggerated form, in almost every landscape which Jacopo Bellini drew, and, through him, in Giovanni Bellini and Mantegna.

In the next artist we must consider, Jan Malouel, we find no such striking naturalism in the general arrangement. His great picture of the Martyrdom of S. Denis from the Louvre (p. 293) is distinctly archaic, distinctly non-pictorial in its conception.

In particular the work which Mr. Durrieu has assigned to Hanslein of Haguenau, v. Revue de l'Art, April 1904. M. Durrieu considers Hanslein an innovator, in that he employs a blue sky instead of a gold background, and this is noteworthy, but in almost every other respect Broederlam had arrived at the same point of naturalism ten years earlier. The peculiar quasiRomanesque architecture of the dome in Broederlam's Annunciation seems also the origin of a type of fantastic architecture which becomes frequent in late miniaturists, e.g., the Missal of St. Magloire (Arsenal 623). Here the form of the throne with a semicircular step anticipates many examples in early Venetian art. We find it in Antonio da Murano, Negroponte, and Domenico Veneziano who, I think, introduced it into Florence. But Broederlam's Annunciation has more direct relations with early Venetian art. For instance, Mr. Julius Wernher's Annunciation, published by me in the Monthly Review, July 1901, might seem almost a Venetian translation of this picture. In my article I pointed out many northern traits in Mr. Wernher's picture the gauffred cloud border, the compact mass of red cherubim, etc. These are more than ever apparent to me after studying the Dijon altarpiece, and extend to the general conception and composition of the architecture.

Again, the picturesque naturalism of the donkey foretells Pisanello, while in the pose and set of the drapery in the Madonna, we seem to recognize the original of many drawings by Pisanello and Stefano da Ževio.

The inter-connection between Italy and the north at this moment of the emergence of naturalistic painting has been often noticed, and, if I am right, we see in this picture at once the effect of influences received from fourteenth-century Sienese art and a point of departure of the reflex wave which affected the art of North Italy in the fifteenth century. There is, of course, a great interval between Broederlam and the complete realists of twenty years later, but this picture already points the way at a surprisingly early date.

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It takes us back rather to the pure French tradition developed under Sienese influence; and though the artist came from Guelderland we must suppose him to have been formed almost entirely in Paris. But if in his want of pictorial composition he lingers behind Broederlam or the unknown master of the Florence diptych, in this picture-which, like Broederlam's, was painted for the Chartreuse of Dijon-he shows a striking originality in the rendering of individual forms, in his anatomical drawing of the nude Christ, and in the startling realism shown in the group of bystanders and the head of Christ. Malouel, indeed, shows himself here as a master of dramatic expression of an essentially northern, prosaic, and almost ignoble kind. We have an instance already of realism, in the modern much-debated sense of the word, the realism which selects and dwells upon what is in itself sordid and repellent.

The face of the executioner is too much caricatured to convince us; but his movement, the outward thrust of the hips to balance the upraised axe, shows a new quickness of observation, a new interest in actual No less remarkable is the appearances. robust, humorous character-drawing of the onlookers whispering scandalous stories about the martyred bishop, while in the pose and expression of the saint to the right Malouel shows his capacity for rendering tenderer, more delicate shades of feeling. Again here, as in Broederlam, the architecture is fantastic and unreal.

The beautiful though much damaged Pietà from the museum at Troyes (p. 291) has some affinity with Malouel's style, but is I think somewhat earlier and represents perhaps that branch of French art in which Malouel was formed. It has none of his rugged characterization, but rather a nobility and grace which recall the finest traditions of French sculpture. The finesse of the workmanship, the delicacy of the

The next picture in point of date which is reproduced here, the Annunciation from Aix (p. 295), shows this naturalistic movement, of which we have attempted to trace the earliest suggestions and mark the tentative beginnings, already at its height. There is a gap in our series of about fifty years, and those are just the years of critical and decisive import. That gap can only be filled by a series of miniatures of which it was not possible to obtain reproductions, and with the early paintings of Hubert van Eyck. Of those miniatures, by far the most important are the paintings in the 'Très riches Heures' of the duc de Berri at Chantilly, to which allusion has been made. These are, indeed, at once the first complete realization of the naturalistic movement and its highest consummation. It is difficult to speak temperately of these works or in such a way that those who have not seen them will not suspect one of exaggeration. Together with van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece they contain the greatest expression of imaginative truth that any cis-alpine country produced during the later middle ages. And though from their very nature they cannot have the same monumental splendour as van Eyck's picture, they are more varied For there is and cover a wider field. scarcely any aspect of nature which the art of modern times has attempted which Pol de Limbourg had not already seen, and rendered with unsurpassed power, in this marvellous book. Whether it be the snow scene of winter, the ploughing and sowing of early spring, the reapers in the meadow by the Seine, the hunt in the autumnal woods of Vincennes, where the last yellow leaves scarcely cover the bare branches and already a carpet of gold lies on the forest

floor, or that incomparable night scene with which he renders the garden of Gethsemane, however new and unattempted by the art of his predecessors the subject may be, Pol de Limbourg realizes it in all its completeness, with all the detail of the early miniaturists, with a beauty of composition and design which he inherits from older traditions, and at the same time with the atmospheric envelopment, with the feeling for the relative values of earth and sky, on which we pride ourselves as the distinctive achievement of

quite modern landscape art. His peasants are drawn with the intimate sympathy of a Millet; they have at times his solemn and melancholy gravity, at times a note of gaiety which reminds us that Chaucer was Pol de Limbourg's older contemporary.

But though the wide range of Pol de Limbourg's sympathies with nature compels us to compare his work to that of recent times, there is a difference in his attitude which it is hard to convey in words. In looking at all the works of this naturalistic school in its origin, whether it be the paintings of Pisanello and Stefano da Zevio in Italy, or the now lost miniatures of Hubert van Eyck, or those of Pol de Limbourg, we feel that there was a possibility for European art of a quite different way of seeing nature from that which it finally adopted for good or evil. It was a more spontaneous, more immediate outlook, in which certain significant facts, sometimes in themselves minute details, were seized upon more directly and held to, even to the loss of a general verisimilitude. It was an intensely naturalistic art, but not a literally naturalistic art; the relation of objects in perspective was seen, but it was used lightly and only when it aided artistic expression; it had not become a fetish. In all these ways the naturalism of this first quarter of the fifteenth century approximated far more to