To the art student these earliest of Memlinc’s paintings--the Donne triptych in particular--are replete with interest. In the first place, they attest the powers then already at the painter’s command as an exponent of his art, and they further serve as a standard of comparison by which to judge his afterwork. Memlinc was pre-eminently a religious artist, deeply imbued with Scriptural lore and well versed in hagiography, a fund of knowledge sublimated in the beautiful mysticism of the school of Cöln which had early subjugated his poetic temperament. His conception of the Madonna, based on a fervent appreciation of the purity, the tenderness, and the majesty of her nature was deeply rooted, and it led him to evolve the definite type which he presents to us in the Chatsworth picture, to which he faithfully adheres henceforth, at times enhancing its beauty--as witness the triptych in the Louvre and the altarpiece of Saint John’s Hospital at Bruges--until his ideal culminates in that marvellous embodiment of her supreme attributes preserved to us in the Van Nieuwenhove diptych. The Divine Infant, it is true, may not appeal to one in the same way as do the charming pictures of infant life in which the southern artists excelled. Whatever may be said of the fine men and intellectual women of the race, the northern type of babyhood cannot by any stretch of courtesy, apart from a mother’s loving weakness, be described as graceful. Still Memlinc’s conceptions of the Infant Saviour rank high in point of intellectuality, of expressiveness of eye, of grace of movement and charm of expression. The Donne triptych besides, from the point of view from which we are now considering it, is a valuable asset for the study of the impersonations of saints whom we find constantly recurring in his paintings: to wit, Saint Katherine and Saint Barbara--(Fromentin’s enthusiastic appreciation of these figures in the large altarpiece at Bruges has already been quoted)--Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist, and Saint Christopher. The same may be said of his angels. Taken from another standpoint, these early paintings of Memlinc are invaluable testimony of his rare gift for portraiture. It was a gift which may almost be taken as the specific appanage of the fifteenth century painters of the Netherlandish school. Some, like John van Eyck, used it with scrupulous exactitude, scorning to veil the palpable truth that at the moment and usually obtruded itself on his painstaking eye; others, and Memlinc prominently of their number, loved rather to seize on the fitful manifestation of the inner man and to idealise him. Both artists, taking them as types, were honest and true to their art, notwithstanding that the resulting truth in each case is deceiving, except we have very particular information regarding the individual portrayed. In any event, the Tani and Spinelli portraits are fine examples of the class, though perhaps Sir