Dr Waagen thus summarises the history

Dr Waagen thus summarises the history of painting in the Netherlands during the interval of about a century and a half that elapsed between the death of Jan van Eyck in 1440 and the birth ofPeter Paul Rubens in 1577.

"The great school of the brothers van Eyck," he writes, "which united with a profound and genuine enthusiasm for religious subjects a pure and healthy feeling for nature,decorative paintings, and a talent for portraying her minutest details with truth and fidelity, had continued till the end of the fifteenth century, and in some instances even later, to produce the most admirable works, combining the utmost technical perfection in touch and finish with most vivid and beautiful colouring. To this original school, however, had succeeded a perverted rage for imitating the Italian masters, which had been introduced into the Netherlands by a few painters of talent, particularly by Jean Mabuse and Bernard van Orley. To display their science by throwing their figures into forced and difficult positions and strongly marking the muscles,paintings for sale, by which they thought to emulate the grandeur of Michel Angelo, and to exhibit their learning by the choice of mythological and allegorical subjects, became the aim of succeeding painters, and before these false and artificial views of art, the spirit of religious enthusiasm and the pure, naïve perception of the truth and beauty of nature gradually disappeared.

"In proportion as the Flemish painters lost the proper conception of form, and the feeling for delicacy144 and beauty of outline, it followed of course that they became more and more removed from nature in their desire to rival each other in the forced attitudes of their figures, and in the exhibition of nudity, until at last such disgusting caricatures were produced as we find in the works of Martin Heemskirk or Franz Floris, artists who were even deficient in good colouring, the old inheritance of the school. abstract oil paintings for sale

"Some few painters, however, whose feeling for truth and nature repelled them instinctively from a path so far removed from both, took to portraying scenes of real life with considerable humour and vivacity; or they delineated nature in her commonest aspects with great minuteness of detail; and thus tableaux de genre and landscape originated. Although a few isolated efforts to introduce a better state of things were visible towards the end of the sixteenth century, it was reserved for a mind of no common power to bring about a complete revolution." reproduction oil paintings for sale