tistic work. We may say it was the king, we may have
styles named for the king, but it was Lebrun who made them what they
were. The spirit of the time was there, monarch and man made that, but
it was Lebrun who had the talent to express it in art. It was a time
when France was fully awake, more fully awake than Italy who had, in
fact, commenced the somnolence of her art; she was strong with that
brutal force that is recently up from savagery, and she took her
grandeur seriously.

At least that was the attitude of the king. No lightness, no
effervescing cynical humour ever disturbed the heavy splendour of his
pose. And this grand pose of the king, Lebrun expressed in the heavy
sumptuousness of decoration. The tapestries of that time show the mood
of the day in subject, in border and in colour. All is superb,
grandiose.

Rubens, although not of France, dominated Europe with his magnificence
of style, a style suited to the time, expressing force rather than
refinement, yet with a splendid decorative value in the art we are
considering. Flanders looked to him for inspiration, and his lead was
everywhere followed. His virile work had power to inspire, to transmit
enthusiasm to others, and thus he was responsible for much of the
improvement in decorative art, the re-establishment of that art upon
an intellectual basis. Designs from his hands were full, splendid and
self-assertive; harmony and proportion were there. A study of the
_Antony and Cleopatra_ series and of the plates given in this volume
will establish and verify this.

[Illustration: DESIGN BY RUBENS]

[Illustration: DESIGN BY RUBENS]

Lebrun's century was the same as that of Rubens, but the former had
the fine feeling for art of the Latin, who knows that its first
province is to please. A comparison between the two men must not be
carried too far, for Rubens was essentially a painter, attacking the
field of decoration only with the overflow of imagination, while
Lebrun's life and talent were wholly directed in the way of
beautifying palaces and chateaux. Yet Rubens' work gave a fresh
impulse to tapestry weaving in Brussels while Lebrun was inspiring it
in France.

Lebrun had, then, to direct the talent and the labour of an army of
artists and artisans, and to keep them working in harmony. It was no
mean task, for one artist alone was not left to compose an entire
picture, but each was taken for his specialty. One artist drew the
figures, another the a