Painting

(REMBRANDT)

EUGÈNE FROMENTIN

(GUIDO RENI)

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

(WATTEAU)

EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT

(BENOZZO GOZZOLI)

COSMO MONKHOUSE

(RAPHAEL)

MRS. JAMESON

(RAPHAEL)

F.A. GRUYER

Raphael seemed to have attained perfection in the Virgin with the Fish; however, four or five years later, he was to rise infinitely higher and display something superior to art and inaccessible to science.

It was in 1518 that the Benedictines of the monastery of St. Sixtus ordered this picture. They had required that the Virgin and the Infant Jesus should be in the company of St. Sixtus and St. Barbara. This is how Raphael entered into their views.

So far as it concerns pictures painted upon panel or canvas in tempera or oils, the history of painting begins with Cimabue, who worked in Florence during the latter half of the thirteenth century.

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 of Peter Paul Rubens in 1577.

Not until the year of Gainsborough's death, 1788, was there born another landscape painter. This was John Crome, and he too came from the east of England, nearest to Holland, being born in Norfolk, the neighbouring county to Gainsborough's native Suffolk. Within ten years more, two still greater landscapists were born, also in the east, Constable in Essex, still closer to Sudbury, and Turner in London.