Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/629

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In England. 599 Palace, the Assumption of the Virgin, painted for the. Earl of Arundel, and perhaps the allegory, Peace and War, now in the National Gallery. This painter has always been a favourite in England ; there were more than forty of his works at the Exhibitions at Manchester and at South Kensington. English painters have good grounds for considering Van Dyck as one of their own school. Van Dyck, a native of Antwerp, is as truly English as Claude Lorrain is Italian. Naturally endowed with elegance, of that type at once haughty and frank, he excelled as a portrayer of the English nobility; and his genius well suited the times of Charles I., who made him painter to the Court, and knighted him. All the foreigners before him had passed away without leaving a mark in the art of the country. Van Dyck succeeded almost during his lifetime, and it may be said, that he was the progenitor of Reynolds and of Gainsborough, of Lawrence and of all the English portrait painters up to the present day. Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1591 — 1667) practised success- fully as a portrait painter, chiefly in miniature, in the reigns of Charles I. and Charles II. He was also an architect, and succeeded Inigo Jones as surveyor of the Royal Palaces. Around Van Dyck were grouped a band of Flemings and natives of Holland, his assistants, his pupils, or his imitators, but we have not room to mention them. George Jamesone (1586 — 1644), of Aberdeen, was a good painter ; we have excellent portraits by him in the style of both Van Dyck and Rubens ; for Jameson had worked in the studio of Rubens at Antwerp, and he there met the young Van Dyck. Many of his works may still be seen at Aberdeen and in various residences of the nobility. He