which, ever since the surrender to Parma, had been in the hands of the Catholic clergy. When his education was finished he went to learn painting from Venius, whose studio was then in a street called the Rue Sale,[53] because, it is said, of its extreme dirtiness, and also from Van Noort, who taught in the Rue du Jardin. Thereafter he travelled for eight years in Italy and Spain, gaining friends and painting, always painting, and studying art. News reached him that his mother was ill, and he hurried back to Antwerp, but found on his arrival that she was already dead. Having no longer any home ties, he was on the point of returning to Italy, and Antwerp nearly lost him, when the Archdukes Albert and Isabella persuaded him to remain. This was in 1608. Next year he married Isabelle, daughter of Jean Brant, town clerk of Antwerp, and set up house in the Rue du Couvent, where many of his best-known works were painted. He soon, however, built the mansion in which he lived for the rest of his life, in what is now called the Rue Rubens,[54] to the south of the Place de Meir. He drew the plans himself on the model of some palace he had known in Italy, painted frescoes on the walls, and filled it with curios he had collected during his travels. In his large garden he put up a domed 'Pantheon,' where he arranged the paintings, antique statues and busts, cameos, medals, vases of porphyry, and other treasures which his friends in Italy sent him. His studio was a vast room, from which the largest canvases were easily brought down by a staircase which one of his biographers describes as like that of a royal palace. We know a great deal about his mode of life at Antwerp, and how he was sent journeying on diplomatic errands by the Court of Albert and Isabella to France, Spain, Holland, England, and everywhere received with honour. At home, early in the morning (he rose at four in summer), having already been to Mass, he is at work in his studio, and loves to listen as he paints to some friend who will read to him from Cicero or Plutarch, or, brush in hand, talks with endless vivacity to the guests who have come to call on him. After a walk in his garden he dines frugally and very soberly, for he dreads, we are told by Van Hasselt, the effect of wine on his imagination; and then he works on in his studio till late in the afternoon, when he mounts one of his fine horses and rides till after sunset. In the evening he sups as frugally as he dined, and finishes the day at home in a circle of his most intimate friends, the only society for which he cared. This busy, happy life of Antwerp's greatest citizen closed on May 30, 1640. The statue in the Place Verte[55] was erected to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of his death; but the fruit of his laborious days is the best monument of his fame.