g, with less reason than Hans Holbein
showed, that he should be condemned to portrait painting, yet by no
means undervaluing or slurring over his work. He 'would detain the
persons who sat to him to dinner for an opportunity of studying their
countenances and re-touching their pictures,' 'would have a sitter,
sitting to him seven entire days, mornings and evenings, and would not
once let the man see the picture till it pleased the painter.' Van Dyck
appears to have been a man with the possibilities in him of greater
things than he attained, possibilities which were baffled by his
weakness and self-indulgence, leaving him with such a sense of this as
spoiled his greatest successes.

I have the varying indications of two pictures of Van Dyck from which to
get an impression of his personal appearance. The first picture is that
of a youthful face, soft, smiling, with dark eyes, finely-formed nose,
a slightly open mouth, having a full-cleft under lip, the hair profuse
and slightly curled, but short, and no beard or moustache. The dress is
an open doublet, without a collar, a lace cravat, and one arm half bare.
The second is the picture of Van Dyck in the Louvre, which is judged the
best likeness of the painter. In this his person is slender, his
complexion fair, his eyes grey, his hair chestnut brown, his beard and
whiskers red. He wears a vest of green velvet, with a plain collar.

In his art, Van Dyck, with something of the glow of Rubens, and with a
delicacy peculiarly his own, was decidedly inferior to his great master,
both in power and in fertility of genius. In the superficial refinement
which was so essential a part of Van Dyck, he had the capacity of
conferring on his sitters a reflection of his own outward stateliness
and grace. When he painted at his best his portraits were solid, true,
and masterly, but he has been reproached with sacrificing truth to the
refining process which he practised. Even in the case of Charles I.,
whose portraits are our most familiar examples of Van Dyck, and who thus
lives in the imagination of most people as the very personification of a
noble and handsome cavalier, there have not been wanting critics who
have maintained that Charles,--the son of a plain uncouth father, and of
a mother rather floridly buxom than delicately handsome, and who was in
his childhood a sickly rickety child,--was by no means so well endowed
in the matter of manly beauty as we have supposed. These students of