We pass through a circular vaulted chamber to reach the Flemish rooms.
There is a choice though scanty collection of the German and French
schools. Albert Durer has an Adam and Eve, and a priceless portrait of
himself as perfectly preserved as if it were painted yesterday. He wears
a curious and picturesque costume,--striped black-and-white,--a graceful
tasselled cap of the same. The picture is sufficiently like the statue
at Nuremberg; a long South-German face, blue-eyed and thin,
fair-whiskered, with that expression of quiet confidence you would
expect in the man who said one day, with admirable candor, when people
were praising a picture of his, "It could not be better done." In this
circular room are four great Claudes, two of which, Sunrise and Sunset,
otherwise called the Embarcation of Sta. Paula, and Tobit and the Angel,
are in his best and richest manner. It is inconceivable to us, who
graduate men by a high-school standard, that these refined and most
elegant works could have been produced by a man so imperfectly educated
as Claude Lorrain.
There remain the pictures of the Dutch and the Flemings. It is due to
the causes we have mentioned in the beginning that neither in Antwerp
nor Dresden nor Paris is there such wealth and profusion of the
Netherlands art as in this mountain-guarded corner of Western Europe. I
shall have but a word to say of these three vast rooms, for Rubens and
Van Dyck and Teniers are known to every one.
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