With the accession of Charles the First art began to take a much more important position in the life of the nation. Charles was a man of considerable taste and refined discernment; no longer content with attracting artists to his court, he began to collect fine works purchased in other countries, his example being followed by his brother Prince Henry, by the Earl of Arundel and others among his courtiers; thus the works of the great Italians found their way into England. The walls of the royal palaces blazoned with the handiwork of Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, Correggio and Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto; from the Netherlands came pictures by Rembrandt and Rubens, and the influx thus started was destined to continue until England became the greatest artistic store-house in the world. The greatest artistic event of the reign of Charles I.--the most far-reaching, indeed, in the whole history of art in this country--was the coming of Van Dyck in 1632, for to his influence is directly due the birth and development of our native school of painting culminating in the golden period of the following century. Van Dyck was thirty-three years of age when he came to England; his talent was at its highest point of perfection; he was almost immediately attached to the court among the royal painters, and his success was rapid and unequalled. The king and queen and their children sat to him again and again; there was no courtier or noble lady but wished her portrait to be painted by the fashionable and fascinating artist, and the habit of portrait-painting became so firmly established that neither the revolution, nor the Puritan régime, which followed the death of Charles I., were able to eradicate it. Van Dyck's commissions were so numerous that it became impossible for him to execute the whole of them with his own hand; Van Dyck, as his master Rubens had done in Antwerp, filled his studio with assistants and pupils whom he trained, and who frequently painted the more unimportant portions of his portraits, such as draperies and background. In this manner a considerable number of men received tuition of the utmost value, and, though many of them were foreigners, drawn to London by the reports of successful brothers of the brush, a school was at last founded which was destined to develop into the glorious English school of painting of the eighteenth century.