Finally, it will be noticed, as the visitor goes round the rooms, that many of the pictures are either altogether "unknown" or are attributed to artists whose names are not given, and who are merely described as the "master" of such and such other pictures. This is an interesting and characteristic point. Of individual painters of the Early German School, and for the most part of those of the Early Flemish, very little is known. They seldom signed their names,[30] and the works of the fifteenth century were in the next two centuries treated with neglect. Hence both the attribution of these pictures, and the lives of the painters to whom they are attributed, are still very uncertain. A second reason for this uncertainty is to be found in the Guild system, which was very strict amongst the northern artists. Painting, to the mediæval mind, was a craft like any other, and was subject to the same rules. The Guild educated the artist and bought his materials, and even when he emerged into mastership, stood in many ways between him and his patron. Hence pictures were often regarded as the work not of this or that individual, but of this or that Guild. Hence too the quiet industry and the uncompetitive patience of these Early Flemish painters. "It was not merely the result of chance that the brothers Van Eyck invented their peculiar method of painting by which they were enabled to produce pictures of almost unlimited durability and of unsurpassable finish, provided sufficient care were bestowed upon the work. The spirit of the day and the method of the day were reflections one of another.... Take any picture of this old Flemish School, and regard it carefully, you will find that only so do its beauties strike you at all.... The old Flemish artists did always the thing that was within their powers, striving indeed by daily industry to increase the strength of those powers, but never hoping either by luck or momentary insanity to attain anything unattainable by patient thought and long-continued labour. 'Patient continuance in well-doing' was the open secret of their success" (_Conway_, ch. ii.) Of the later German School, specially distinguished in portraiture, the Gallery has now some fine examples, and here again there is similarity between the German and the early Flemish painters. "If," says Ruskin, "the reader were to make the circuit of this collection for the purpose of determining which picture united in its modes of execution the highest reach of achievement with the strongest assurance of durability, we believe that he would finally pause before a small picture or panel, representing two quaintly dressed figures in a dimly lighted room." Turn from the portraits by Jan van Eyck to the portraits by Cranach and Albert Dürer, and much of the same minute fidelity and careful workmanship will be found. For Holbein's portraits, the reader is referred to the notes (pp. 613-4). [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: