widest, enlivened by countless forms and adorned by splendid
buildings.

Molanus, the savant of Loewen, proclaimed Dierick Bouts, born like his
predecessor Ouwater at Haarlem, to be the inventor of landscape
painting (claruit inventor in describendo rare); but the van Eycks
were certainly before him, though he increased the significance of
landscape painting and shewed knowledge of aerial perspective and
gradations of tone. Landscape was a distinct entity to him, and could
excite the mood that suited his subject, as, for instance, in the
side picture of the Last Supper, where the foreground is drawn with
such exactness that every plant and even the tiny creatures crawling
on the grass can be identified.

The scenery of Roger van der Weyden of Brabant--river valleys
surrounded by jagged rocks and mountains, isolated trees, and meadows
bright with sappy green--is clearly the result of direct Nature
study; it has a uniform transparent atmosphere, and a clear green
shimmer lies over the foreground and gradually passes into blue haze
further back.

His pupil, Memling, shews the same fine gradations of tone. The
composition of his richest picture, 'The Marriage of St Catherine,'
did not allow space for an unbroken landscape, but the lines of wood
and field converge to a vista in such a way that the general effect
is one of unity.

Joachim de Patenir, who appeared in 1515, was called a landscape
painter by his contemporaries, because he reduced his sacred figures
to a modest size, enlarged his landscape, and handled it with extreme
care. He was very far from grasping it as a whole, but his method was
synthetical; his river valleys, with masses of tree and bush and
romantic rocks, fantastic and picturesque, with fortresses on the
river banks, all shew this.

Kerry de Bles was like him, but less accurate; with all the rest of
the sixteenth-century painters of Brabant and Flanders, he did not
rise to the idea of landscape as a whole.

The most minute attention was given to the accurate painting of
single objects, especially plants; the Flemings caring more for
perfect truth to life, the Dutch for beauty. The Flemings generally
sought to improve their landscape by embellishing its lines, while
the Dutch gave its spirit, but adhered simply and strictly to Nature.
The landscapes of Peter Brueghel the elder, with their dancing
peasants surrounded by rocks, mills, groups of trees, are painful in
their thoroughness; and Jan