Jan was of another sort; equally great as a craftsman, he was a fine gentleman, a courtier, the friend of princes, and a diplomat. In those barbarous days before the culmination of the era of enlightenment, art was not a cult, isolated from life, nor were artists a sort of creature apart, made so by the possession of a then undiscovered and quite pathological affliction called the “artistic temperament.” They were good citizens and an integral part of a like-minded community, serving their kind after many fashions, amongst them being the honourable and admirable craft of art. Of this craft Jan was past master; he painted statues and illuminated missals and fashioned stained glass; he created great altar-pieces and produced living portraits of old ecclesiastics and worthy burghers and their wives; for all I know he was an architect as well--at all events he might have been, as is proved by the wonderful drawing of St. Barbara with its background of a great Gothic tower under construction. A thoroughly typical example of his painting is the St. Donatian altar-piece, a votive picture ordered by the excellent old Canon Van der Paele, who is shown in adoration before Our Lady and the Holy Child and attended by St. Donatian himself and St. George. Mr. Berenson could find no finer example than this of that “space composition” on which he rightly lays such stress; Holbein could paint no more exact and characteristic portraits; all the goldsmiths of Byzantium could not rival the jewel work of armour and orphreys, brocades and embroideries, and sculptures and inlays, while the colour, both in its individual parts and its composition, comes nearer the living light of the [Illustration: A DRAWING OF ST. BARBARA, JAN VAN EYCK] windows of Chartres than any other painted colour in the world. One would like to hang this particular picture (for a time only, then replacing it over an altar where alone it belongs) in the midst of a “Rubens Gallery,” or a room in the Luxembourg or the Royal Academy, and call all the world to see.