En Priamus: sunt hic etiam sua præmia laudi, En. i. 460. See there, where old unhappy Priam stands ! He said (his tears a ready passage find), DRYDEN. DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGUE, &c. &c. ALL anecdotes connected with the private history of Vandyck, or the exercise of his art, have been so carefully collected by various writers, and the doubt, so interesting to the English, at length cleared up,' as to the time and duration of his early visit to England, that it would be as unnecessary to enter upon his biography here as to dwell upon his excellence as an artist and as a portrait-painter. But those who have been led to make his works an object of interest and pursuit are naturally struck with the heavy burthen which is laid upon his reputation in the very large number of indifferent pictures which, through ignorance or dishonesty, are attributed to his pencil. Flowing locks, and collars trimmed with lace turned flat upon a dark costume, seem often to be the only foundation on which an ill-painted picture claims the right to be called "a Vandyck ;” the worst copies are stoutly maintained to be originals; and names of persons are assigned to portraits, in proof of authenticity, that violate all possibility as to date or place: those who were dead before Vandyck was born, and those who were born after his death, are alike supposed to have had the honour of being portrayed by the great Apelles of the seventeenth century. Pretensions such as these are, in fact, the homage which fame. 'Mr. Carpenter's 'Notices of Vandyck.' VOL. III. R and excellence provoke, and spring from the natural desire to possess, or be thought to possess, what the world has agreed to value highly but whilst gross pretensions may excite ridicule, and interested frauds call forth the indignation of the zealous admirers of a favourite master, it must also be allowed that considerable difficulty arises even amongst competent judges and honest witnesses in determining the originality, or rather perhaps the degree of originality, in several of Vandyck's pictures. It is clear that from his studio many more portraits emanated than could have been executed by him alone during the few months of his first visit to England in 1620, or in the nine years of his second residence, beginning in 1632. It is well known that he had working for him scholars such as David Beck, John de Reyn, and others, who successfully imitated his painting when employed under his direction to copy his pictures or paint from his designs, and into whose work he could always introduce his own handling of the more important parts, and add those peculiar touches that set at once his own mark on the performance, and thus raise it from the rank of a copy to the dignity and value of a duplicate production. Consequently, the repetition of a portrait from the studio of Vandyck furnishes no evidence by which to solve the question of copy or original. When, therefore, the unequal excellence of the picture affords room for doubt, the point of how much or how little was the work of the master's own hand can only now be divined by the skill of the connoisseur. To these difficulties must be added the more commonplace ones occasioned by the injuries of time and the disguises effected by picture-cleaners' repairs. On the other hand, there are no works which afford greater facilities, both artistic and historical, to be recognised as proceeding from his studio than Vandyck's English portraits. They were chiefly the portraits of persons distinguished by their rank or position; and of many there are prints, either contemporaneous or nearly so, with the name of "Vandyke pinxit" inscribed on the engraving. Again, the age of the persons represented, being known, will be found to correspond or not either to the time of his first or his second visit to England; and the dissimilarity of the costume of these two periods offers another means of testing the correspondence of the apparent age of the person depicted and the time when Vandyck could have painted him. When the subject of a portrait is represented as bearing the insignia of any particular order of knighthood, the date of his admission into that order, being compared with that of Vandyck's first or second visit, affords another guide as to the period at which it was painted; unless, as may have happened in some cases, the garter or ribbon were added by a later artist. Another mark of Vandyck's studio is the frequent introduction of certain curtains, which probably belonged to him, and became favourite pieces of furniture for the purpose of backgrounds, and of which the pattern as well as colour are so carefully painted as to render them at once familiar to those who have been accustomed to look attentively at the composition of his pictures. It would be tedious to narrate all the instances in which the favoured rich damask curtains appear, and how the same pattern may be tracedsometimes hanging down, sometimes folded transversely, sometimes drawn tight-giving the effect of an oak panel; but there are the curtains, sufficiently well defined to leave no difficulty to any one in recognising and identifying them as easily as the well-known furniture of his own house. There are many peculiarities in the composition of Vandyck's pictures which characterise his pencil, and which mark what in art may be termed his "feeling" in composition, his arrangement of light and shadow, and the form of his designs. The frequent introduction of a small portion of landscape in the background-the mass of shadow produced by some object introduced on one side of the picture—the extraordinary delicacy of his half-tints, and even the peculiar blue hue which his pictures assume when faded-the pointed hand, the arm resting on the hip or on a ledge, so as to relieve the straight line of the standing figure by the introduction of a triangular form on the side, or the foot raised on a step to produce the same effect by the bended knee-the rich satin in his costumes-the |