has a youthful, not to say girlish, expression, and the whole atmosphere of the piece is innocent with a dash of the unintelligent. We feel the presence not of a man who was spiritually exalted above the average, but rather of one who was mentally below it. The details, evidently intended, are of the highest interest. The king's gorgeous mantle of cloth of gold reminds one of the coat that he is said to have possessed, valued at 30,000 marks. He displays his favourite badge of the white hart, which he probably adopted in memory of his mother, the fair maid of Kent, whose device was a white hind. The attendant angels, like so many "varlets of the crown," all wear the same badge on their tunics, and here we may perhaps read a sign of the custom that the king imposed of wearing livery not only on the mantle but on the undergarment as well. The difficulty begins when we pass from the enjoyment and decipherment of this precious relic to the attempt to assign it a place and a name in the history of art. In the first place, it seems to go without saying, as a kind of principle of criticism, that whatever we find in England must either have been imported from abroad, or if made at home, then made by alien hands. This view could only be combated in detail, and with the help of wellfounded general ideas as to the distinctive character and quality of English art. Anyhow, when so much preliminary work still needs to be done, we shall not venture to plead that the picture is or may be English. We know that the king was an art-lover, though there is nothing to show that the costly picture of the Trinity presented to him and his queen by the City of London was home-made. On the other hand, the name of John Sutton, the carver, who flourished in his reign, sounds English enough. Again, the picture has been called Bohemian, and the mere fact that the king wedded the sister of Wenceslaus, of Bohemia, is enough to have suggested this hypothesis. But if, as is generally supposed, the picture commemorates the king's solemn sanction of the crusade of Henry Despenser, the militant bishop of Norwich, it can hardly have been painted later than 1382, that is the very year of the Bohemian marriage. And we should have expected to see the Bohemian influence, if we must introduce it, not so early in full bloom, but spreading by slow degrees in the wake of the bride. There is no doubt that, at first sight, the picture has a tempting look of Italy; but this is mainly due to its general impression of sweetness and gravity like Fra Angelico's. The types and the details, however, do not point with sufficient certainty to any particular Italian of the latter end of the fourteenth century. The Virgin and Child, and the choir of angels, are charming both in sentiment and in scheme; but the details, especially of the hands and drapery, are disappointing. The artist is most successful with the figures of saints on the left, which show a respectable attempt at vigour and realism. On the whole, he has the air of being more accustomed to the prettiness of miniatures than to the higher walks of art, and this feature may give us the clue to his whereabouts. Whoever he was, he comes close to the artist of the Hours of the Duc de Berri, at Chantilly—that is, to Pol de Limbourg-and we conclude provisionally that he was a Fleming not untouched by influence from Italy. In the presence of this relic we forget the failure and the fall of Richard, and think only of the friend of Chaucer and Gower, who forgave his enemies: Nec habet ultrices rex pius iste manus Quot mala quot mortes tenero sit passus ab ævo 1 [Since the above was written in 1902, the diptych has been the subject of much criticism and controversy. Mr. Strong's views are left without comment, but it may be noted that both this and the preceding essay show a growing belief in the existence of an independent school of English art in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.] DRAWINGS BY THE OLD MASTERS AT CHATSWORTH' [1902: AET. 39] HE bulk of the collection of Old Masters' drawings at Chatsworth was acquired by William, second Duke of Devonshire, early in the eighteenth century, when it was the fashion for every noble to make the grand tour, and to collect works of art, more or less lavishly and intelligently, as the case might be. Of the private collections of England that remain intact, this is probably the richest, and the variety and importance of its examples of the great masters would give it a respectable place even among the chief public museums. Though the gems of the collection are still, probably, the "Liber Veritatis," the sketch-books of Van Dyck' and Rembrandt, and the two volumes of designs for masques by Inigo Jones, nothing from these sources has been included here. The object has been rather to bring forward the work of the older masters, both Italian and Teutonic, with whom of late years history and criticism have been more particularly concerned. Many of the finest examples at Chatsworth come from the collection of Govaert Flinck, a pupil of Rembrandt, in whom, as so often happens now, the appreciative seems to have been far in excess of the creative power. His mark is, as a rule, a sure certificate of quality and genuineness. The collection was still further enriched Reprinted by permission of Messrs. Duckworth and Co., from "Reproductions of Drawings by the Old Masters in the Collection of the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth," London, 1902. 2 The sketch-book of Van Dyck, which had mysteriously disappeared, was restored to Chatsworth under Mr. Strong's librarianship, by the generous consent of Mr. Herbert Cook, into whose possession the sketch-book had eventually passed. by the break up and dispersion of the treasures of Charles I, Sir Peter Lely, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The existing attributions of the drawings are traditional. They date from the time when a few great names monopolized the interest of collectors, when a Venetian drawing was a Titian a priori and a Roman study a Raphael, and when criticism had not yet pushed forward the second-rate on other grounds than that of the artistic merit of their work. On the other hand, even so, it should not be forgotten that the stream of tradition has brought down much that was once matter of common knowledge or of easy verification, and that, left to our own resources, however elaborate, we should find it impossible to restore. The study of drawings presents all the difficulties that attach to the study of pictures, and more, peculiar to itself. Historical inquiry, through which, as most educated students have begun to see, the way of progress leads, throws little light on this part of the field. Vasari, the first and greatest of collectors, mentions "our book" only incidentally. It does not occur to him to treat pictures and drawings as parallel and complementary. Moreover-though in the case of pictures the record is incomplete enough-in the case of drawings the gaps made by time, neglect, or deliberate destruction are so great that the subjective element is apt from the beginning to pervade our whole material. In such cases as that of Raffaelino or of Baccio Bandinelli there is no great difficulty. We can explain from history the place they fill. Leonardo can be studied in embarrassing profusion at a few great centres, and the fact that most of his drawings are really illustrations to texts in a strange character and on strange themes may have helped to preserve them. Michelangelo has left us a groundwork in the shape of a few drawings that were as famous in their day as any of his more ambitious achievements; but, apart from these, our own modest demand for the signs of genius, in all cases and in every part, often introduces difficulties. We want the ancients to be always classical, and we picture men of genius as always in the attitude which-even with much less than genius-they would certainly assume now. Where tradition fails us, there is no clue except what comes of a comparison between pictures and drawings. This process is inevitable, for there is no other; but it is fatally easy and enticing to overstrain the evidence. Especially is this the case with the great colourists, like Titian and Correggio, who, revelling in the freedom of brushwork, had no occasion to steady themselves with the point. As a painter, it would be difficult to exclude Reynolds from the first rank; but, as he himself was aware, his power failed him when he drew. We possess some results of that left-handed process, and they suggest his pictures without reflecting them. As for Van Dyck, it is even possible that, if we had as few pen drawings by him as we are supposed to have by Titian, they might have missed the honour of his name altogether, so painfully do they contrast with the masterly flow of his brushwork and the virile character of his chalk heads. A fair example of the vanity of dogmatizing is afforded by the much debated Martyrdom of a Saint in this collection. It was attributed to Giorgione by Morelli, who, having abolished more than two-thirds of his reputed work, contrived like Tarquin's Sibyl to raise the credit of the remainder to such a degree that Giorgione, quit of the control of history and hovering, as it were, between fact and fiction, reveals himself to the critics as something higher and better than anything that can be shown. In composition and design the drawing resembles his early works; but the execution has nothing of the timidity of a first essay. The sole conclusion, therefore, that the facts warrant is that it may have been executed by Giorgione, but under conditions the like of which appears in no other of his surviving works. It is true that the spirit of the scene pervades all the products of that artistic movement of which he has been consecrated the eponymous hero; but that points in no single direction exclusively; there were many who were quite capable of reaching all that is given here. On the whole, therefore, it is for reasons of this kind that, if dogma be more enticing, we have judged doubt to be safer. Besides, for the reason that an essay is no convenient substitute for a label, many of the plates still bear the old names. In the case, for example, of Raphael, the text makes it sufficiently plain that, though the drawings still belong to his sphere, they have all shifted more or less from the centre. Care has been taken throughout to preserve the opinions of Morelli, who was the first to make systematic use of the evidence of drawings in discussing artistic problems. In fact, it seems likely |