Foucquet was born in 1415, and must have painted this picture before 1450, when Agnes Sorel died. Louis the Eleventh employed him to paint his likeness, in which Foucquet was unsuccessful; and Margaret of Austria seems to have prized a picture of his in her possession, which represented the “Virgin and Child." His style may be judged by the miniatures of an illuminated Josephus in the Paris National Library.

Later still in France was Jehan Cloet, a painter whom we find employed at first in the household of the Duke of Burgundy, in 1475.

The descendants of Cloet flourished in Paris for three generations. His son became painter to Francis the First; and the name of Jean having been lengthened into Jehanet, he gradually became the Jannette of our galleries. The portraits of Francis the First and his Queen, at Hampton Court, will show the style of Jehanet,1 and the influence exercised upon the early painters of France by the Flemish School. But the love of Francis the First for art was not satisfied by having a painter whose manner had been founded on the teaching of a Fleming. He occasionally sent to Belgium for pictures, dealing, usually, with Jean Dubois, of Antwerp; to whom we find him paying, on more than one occasion, large sums for pictures.

Slight as was the influence of art in France during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was still more so in England, where the traces of painting are so feeble that the patient research of Vertue almost failed to discover

1 Nos. 329, 340, Hampton Court Gallery Catalogue.

anything worthy of remembrance. It was not till the latter end of the fifteenth century that Mabuse painted in England. In the following century, numerous Flemish painters migrated from Flanders, and gave themselves up chiefly to the production of portraits. The earliest painters of Belgium did not, therefore, exercise any influence in England; and the manner which Mabuse, Cornelis, and Lucas de Heere imported, and made fashionable, was no longer the old and original one inherited from the Van Eycks-but a bastard and feeble style, adulterated by commingling with the various schools of Italy and Germany.

APPENDIX.

Two pictures by John Van Eyck have fallen under our observation since the bulk of the present work passed through the press. They confirm the views which we had been led to take of the career of the great painter, whilst they suggest reflections of additional weight in support of our previous arguments. We had been led, by the examination of John Van Eyck's masterpieces, to the conviction that he reached the pinnacle of his greatness about the time when the altar-piece of the "Mystic Lamb" was completed. That great work was not only the finest effort of the two great masters of Belgium, but it was the noblest monument of Flemish art. After its production came the decline and fall of the School of Bruges; and it might be said with truth that the Van Eycks were at once the Giottos, Masaccios, Raphael and Michael Angelo of Flanders. We were not slow, however, in giving expression to the feeling that, remarkable as was the altar-piece of the " Mystic Lamb," and deserving as were its creators of praise for its conception, it had faults which no partiality could conceal. Nor is it improbable that, in the

endeavour to explain these defects, we dwelt upon them in such a degree as to give our judgment a semblance of severity, likely at first sight to appear too great, but which was really not so. It should, in truth, be borne in mind that the elements developed in Flanders by the Van Eycks alone, and concentrated in their persons, were in Italy diffused over generations of painters. The most perfect creation of the Northern school was the production of a century in which the Southern was progressing at a gigantic speed; and the faults which may be found in the art of Belgium must, therefore, be qualified by a due consideration of the period in which the Van Eycks laboured and lived. The "Mystic Lamb" thus forming the pinnacle of Belgian art, it became interesting to ascertain whether the decline which followed its completion commenced in the person of John Van Eyck himself, or only in those of his own and his brother's immediate followers. The conviction was forced upon us, that John Van Eyck began to decline from the standard which he had himself erected, and that, as he increased in years, he proportionately lost his powers. The pictures whose dates were nearest to 1432 were the most remarkable for his peculiar qualities, whilst those executed later exhibited the progress of decay in his powers.

The two pictures by John Van Eyck of which we have now to speak, are of the former time,-one of them belonging to Mr. Weld Blundell, of Ince Blundell Hall, being dated 1432; and the second, the property of the Marquis of Exeter, at Burleigh House, though not authenticated by his signature, bearing the trace of the hand of John Van Eyck about the same year.