WOMAN IN ART
What had all this to do with art? It made Dutch art individual, characteristic; and to this day it portrays the out-of-door life and interests; their environment was sea and sky, ships and long, level distances, of acres of perfect tillage—colorful in spring and summer, with wind mills and mast heads piercing the green of pastures and pollard willows; environment that nourished invisible yet personal powers. Their pleasures were simple, often uncouth, and vulgar, but culture and refinement grew upward, not downward.
It is true, Italy had a more beautiful outer world, more historic setting, more ancient art and noted buildings. The Creator of the World avoided monotony and man tries to follow the example. Like the seasons each country has its own charm. The people of sunny Italy seem to have been more churchly in their seeing and interests. They had eyes for saints and sinners, painters and prelates, pictures and palaces, but the charm of our beautiful world was to be discovered later.
Even the industrious Flemings could not see beyond Flanders. There seem to be four steps in the progress of their art, each with a distinct interest and value. First the churchly or scripture subjects, painted with reverence, if not with full knowledge, are still preserved to us in Van Eyck's own colors in the oil method perfected by the brothers Jan and Hubert, which have endured for four hundred years in their first brightness, and may last as many more. Perspective, proportion, and values are the other steps, a knowledge of which painters everywhere were striving for. A contrasting womanhood we find at this period in an Italian princess, a Medici, grafted, by marriage, with Henry IV, onto the throne of France.
Peter Paul Rubens, one of the five greatest colorists of the world, was not so far in time from the Van Eycks and Memling but that he profited by their contributions to the chemical knowledge and equipment of the painter, to which he added more glowing color, a mastery of which he gleaned during a lengthy visit at Venice. Titian was master of color there, with Tintoretto and Veronese as close seconds. Rubens returned to Antwerp enamored of Titian's use of color and the substantial element of flesh, wherewith that master clothed the mythological beings he conjured out of the recks of time. Afterward he raised that last accessory to the nth power in the series of Medici paintings now in the Luxembourg Gallery. With due reverence and admiration for the masterpieces of Rubens that, fortunately, survived the late World War, we refer here only to the type of woman that expresses his ideal or the ideal of those for whom he painted, and the paintings represent a voluptuous age and type.
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