EASTLAKE’S HISTORY OF OIL-PAINTING 257

delicacy; as approaching more unaffectedly and more closely than any other work to the simple truths of natural colour and space; and as exhibiting, even in its quaint and minute treatment, conquest over many of the difficulties which the boldest practice of art involves.

This picture, bearing the inscription “Johannes Van Eyck (fuit?)¹ hic, 1434,” is probably the portrait, certainly the work, of one of those brothers to whose ingenuity the first invention of the art of oil-painting has been long ascribed. The volume before us is occupied chiefly in determining the real extent of the improvements they introduced, in examining the processes they employed, and in tracing the modifications of those processes adopted by later Flemings, especially Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vandyck. Incidental notices of the Italian system occur, so far as, in its earlier stages, it corresponded with that of the north; but the consideration of its separate character is reserved for a following volume,² and though we shall expect with interest this concluding portion of the treatise, we believe that, in the present condition of the English school, the choice of the methods of Van Eyck, Bellini, or Rubens, is as much as we could modestly ask or prudently desire.

8. It would have been strange indeed if a technical perfection like that of the picture above described (equally characteristic of all the works of those brothers), had been at once reached by the first inventors of the art. So far was this from being the case, and so distinct is the evidence of the practice of oil-painting in antecedent periods, that of late years the discoveries of the Van Eycks have not

¹ [The word here queried had previously been read “fecit”; it is, however, clearly “fuit,” as Eastlake (p. 185 n.) correctly stated. His translation,“John Van Eyck was this man,” from which he supposed that the picture was the painter’s portrait, is, however, untenable, in view of facts subsequently unearthed about the picture. The signature, “John Van Eyck was here,” is characteristic of the spirit in which the painter worked; “he only professed to come, look, and record what he saw.” On the frame of another portrait in the National Gallery (No. 222) he wrote, “Als ich kan”-the first words of an old Flemish proverb, “As I can, but not as I will.”]

² [The volume by Eastlake here reviewed was limited to Flemish painting; a discussion of Italian painting being promised hereafter. This was included in a second volume published posthumously in 1869, under the editorship of Eastlake’s widow.]

XII. R

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