r little offerings seem
to me to be a great deal more pious than Rubens's big pictures; just as
is the widow with her poor little mite compared to the swelling Pharisee
who flings his purse of gold into the plate.

A couple of days of Rubens and his church pictures makes one thoroughly
and entirely sick of him. His very genius and splendor pails upon one,
even taking the pictures as worldly pictures. One grows weary of being
perpetually feasted with this rich, coarse, steaming food. Considering
them as church pictures, I don't want to go to church to hear, however
splendid, an organ play the "British Grenadiers."

The Antwerpians have set up a clumsy bronze statue of their divinity
in a square of the town; and those who have not enough of Rubens in the
churches may study him, and indeed to much greater advantage, in a good,
well-lighted museum. Here, there is one picture, a dying saint taking
the communion, a large piece ten or eleven feet high, and painted in an
incredibly short space of time, which is extremely curious indeed
for the painter's study. The picture is scarcely more than an immense
magnificent sketch; but it tells the secret of the artist's manner,
which, in the midst of its dash and splendor, is curiously methodical.
Where the shadows are warm the lights are cold, and vice versa; and the
picture has been so rapidly painted, that the tints lie raw by the side
of one another, the artist not having taken the trouble to blend them.

There are two exquisite Vandykes (whatever Sir Joshua may say of them),
and in which the very management of the gray tones which the President
abuses forms the principal excellence and charm. Why, after all, are we
not to have our opinion? Sir Joshua is not the Pope. The color of one
of those Vandykes is as fine as FINE Paul Veronese, and the sentiment
beautifully tender and graceful.

I saw, too, an exhibition of the modern Belgian artists (1843), the
remembrance of whose pictures after a month's absence has almost
entirely vanished. Wappers's hand, as I thought, seemed to have grown
old and feeble, Verboeckhoven's cattle-pieces are almost as good as
Paul Potter's, and Keyser has dwindled down into namby-pamby prettiness,
pitiful to see in the gallant young painter who astonished the Louvre
artists ten years ago by a hand almost as dashing and ready as that of
Rubens himself. There were besides many caricatures of the new German
school, which are in themselves caricatures o